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New fossil finds from China are painting a different picture of the mammals that lived alongside the dinosaurs during the Mesozoic era. Most mammals known from this time are thought of as relatively small, nocturnal creatures–the hunted rather than the hunters. Findings published today in the journal Nature provide the first direct evidence that some mammals dined on their dinosaur contemporaries. Researchers from the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing recovered the 130-million-year-old remains of an opossum-size mammal from China’s fossil-rich Liaoning province....

The world’s food supply is on a dangerous path, according to a sweeping new study published in Nature Sustainability. The international team of researchers outlines three bad things happening simultaneously: Food shocks are coming more frequently, thanks in part to climate change; the food system has become more susceptible to disruptions amid globalization; and the cumulative impact of recent shocks has eroded people’s ability to prepare for the next one. Food shocks are already driving a global spike in hunger....

Helicopters and fire trucks proved unsuccessful at replenishing damaged nuclear fuel pools at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi plant on Thursday. The spent-fuel pools contain a large amount of radioactive material that is not contained as well as that in the reactor cores. And although information has been spotty, nuclear experts worry that this fuel—which should be submerged in circulating water to keep it from overheating—has been at least partly exposed in the pools belonging to reactor Nos....

An F-4 tornado that was nearly a mile wide touched down in Moore, Okla., causing devastating damage, several injuries and at least 51 deaths. The tornado touched down at about 2:53 p.m. CDT Monday in Moore, between Norman and Oklahoma City. Entire neighborhoods were leveled, according to local police. Power lines were reported down on Santa Fe Road near the Briarwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City, Okla. It was reported that the elementary school had a large gas leak....

Male scientists are more likely to share their published work than are women—but only with other men, a study of hundreds of researchers has found. Humans are generally considered to be a highly cooperative species, says Jorg Massen, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna. But most of the evidence for that assumption comes from artificial situations such as computerized cooperation tasks. “I wanted to test human prosociality in an everyday situation,” he says....

Nasa’s Mars 2020 rover will take a small step towards helping us directly explore the red planet, by studying how to convert its carbon dioxide atmosphere to oxygen. Jack Mustard from Brown University suggests the Mars Oxygen In-situ resource utilization Experiment (MOXIE) technology could in future help refuel vehicles returning to Earth. ‘It represents an opportunity to sever the tether between Earth and exploration,’ says Mustard, who chaired the Mars 2020 science definition team....

In the mid-1980s, Paul Moorcraft, then a war correspondent, journeyed with a film crew into Afghanistan to produce a documentary about the fifth anniversary of the Soviet invasion. The trip took them behind Soviet lines. “We were attacked every fucking day by the Russians,” says the colorful Welshman. But the real trouble started later, when Moorcraft tried to tally his expenses, such as horses and local garb for his crew. Even with a calculator, the simple sums took him ten times longer than they should have....

The Perseid meteor shower is the most widely observed and dependable annual meteor display of the year, and its peak this week has all the earmarks of being an excellent example of celestial fireworks, weather permitting. This year, the Perseids will peak in the overnight hours of Wednesday and Thursday (Aug. 12 and 13) just one day before the new moon. Unlike last year, when a brilliant and nearly full moon washed out all but the brightest meteors, 2015 should be a very opportune year for observing “shooting stars” with your own eyes or cameras....

Scoop up a shovelful of healthy soil, and you’ll likely be holding more living organisms than there are people on Earth. Like citizens of an underground city that never sleeps, tens of thousands of subterranean species of invertebrates, nematodes, bacteria and fungi are constantly filtering our water, recycling nutrients and helping to regulate the planet’s temperature. But under fields covered in tightly knit rows of corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops, a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is wreaking havoc, according to our recent analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science....

Poor people die sooner when living in higher-income neighborhoods than in poorer ones, a new report concludes. Researchers analyzed 17 years’ worth of data on thousands of people from four mid-size northern California cities to determine the death rates among different socioeconomic groups residing in the same neighborhoods. Higher rents or property taxes and limited access to free services may explain the paradoxical outcome for poor people with better-off neighbors....

The idea of the human mind as the domain of absolute protection from external intrusion has persisted for centuries. Today, however, this presumption might no longer hold. Sophisticated neuroimaging machines and brain-computer interfaces detect the electrical activity of neurons, enabling us to decode and even alter the nervous system signals that accompany mental processes. Whereas these advances have a great potential for research and medicine, they pose a fundamental ethical, legal and social challenge: determining whether or under what conditions it is legitimate to gain access to or interfere with another person’s neural activity....

Surprising Ways to Be Wise: The Wisest One in the Room: How You Can Benefit from Social Psychology’s Most Powerful Insights by Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross Free Press, 2015 ($26) To appreciate how good this book is, you need to know a bit about social psychology—the rock-star branch of psychology that has produced a long list of headline-grabbing research, including Stanley Milgram’s classic 1960s experiments at Yale University showing how easily people in lab coats can pressure average citizens into apparently shocking innocent people to death....

One of the daunting aspects of Alzheimer’s disease is that it is seldom diagnosed until victims have already lost significant cognitive function. Even if treatments are developed, they will not have sweeping impact unless early-detection methods are devised. One step toward this grail may come from psychiatrist and brain researcher Eric Reiman of the Banner Alzheimer’s Institute in Phoenix. He has been using positron-emission tomography (PET) to study cognitively healthy people at three levels of genetic risk for the disease—those with two copies, one copy or no copies of the apolipoprotein E type 4 (APOE4) gene, which has been implicated in autopsies of Alzheimer’s victims....

A study led by Alan Meier, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, concluded that in many cases, these Energy Star-labeled thermostats are making it hard to save energy. The reason is many people don’t know how to use them. Programmable thermostats allow users to automatically set them at lower temperatures when they’re asleep or not at home. A typical setting could have the thermostat switch 10 to 15 degrees lower at night or during the workday but stay at normal levels when people are at home and awake....

A federal study released today explains for the first time the link between global mercury emissions and the contamination of tuna and other marine life in the North Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Geological Survey study [pdf] documents the formation in the North Pacific of methylmercury, a highly toxic form of mercury that rapidly accumulates in the food chain to levels that can cause serious health concerns for people who consume seafood....

As astronauts on space shuttle Atlantis perform what is likely the final tune-up of the Hubble Space Telescope, a 19-year-old workhorse that has greatly advanced astronomy and the profile of space science, the European Space Agency (ESA) is readying two more heavy-hitting astronomical spacecraft for deployment into space. On Thursday ESA will launch Planck and Herschel, two separate observatories that will share a rocket into space. Although their capabilities and goals are different, both spacecraft will peer at radiation emitted early in the universe’s history to shed light on our cosmic origins....

French mathematician Yves Meyer has won the 2017 Abel Prize for his “pivotal role” in establishing the theory of wavelets — data-analysis tools used in everything from pinpointing gravitational waves to compressing digital films. The prize of 6 million Norwegian kroner (US$710,000) — hailed as the Nobel prize of mathematics — was announced by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters on 21 March. Following the tradition of the Nobels, Meyer learnt that he was the winner only when he received a call on the morning of the announcement....

DISH, Tex.—A satellite broadcasting company bought the rights to rename this town a few years ago in exchange for a decade of free television, but it is another industry that dominates the 200 or so residents: natural gas. Five facilities perched on the north Texas town’s outskirts compress the gas newly flowing to the surface from the cracked Barnett Shale more than two kilometers beneath the surface, collectively contributing a brew of toxic chemicals to the air....

Editor’s Note: This story will be published in the October/November issue of Scientific American Mind. Losing a loved one is always painful, but for most people time eventually heals the wounds. For about 10 to 20 percent of the bereaved, however, accepting and getting over a loss remains extremely difficult, even years later. Now researchers have come a step closer to elucidating the neurobiological underpinnings of this condition called complicated grief (CG)....

OSLO, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Sea levels could rise by a greater-than-expected six metres (20 ft) over many centuries even if governments cap global warming around current levels, scientists said on Thursday, based on clues from an ancient warm period. Sea levels have risen by about 20 cms (8 inches) in the past 100 years, with a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica spilling water into the oceans. Many studies have assumed that rising temperatures are a condition for a much faster melt....