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A deluge of repeated rainstorms set the stage for the near-disaster at the Oroville Dam in California, a crisis that foreshadows what the Golden State can expect more of with climate change, several experts said. The situation at Oroville — in Butte County, Calif., northeast of Sacramento — happened after both an infrastructure failure and a weather event, said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA. A series of storms powered by a phenomenon known as the atmospheric river hit Northern California this winter....

When Carl Sagan said that “we’re made of star stuff,” he wasn’t being metaphoric. He was simply noting—in his uniquely precise and poetic way—that the raw materials that constitute our physical bodies were forged in the bellies of distant, long-extinguished stars. The photographer Ignacio Torres has made this insight visual. In his gorgeous images—presented as animated GIFs as a nod to the cosmic movement of space and time—he transforms Sagan’s world-altering perspective into something immediate and unnerving....

Beyond its scientific backing, the notion that a COVID-19 patient might wind up with long-term lung scarring or breathing issues has the ring of truth. After all, we hear the stories, right? The virus can leave survivors explaining how they struggled to breathe, or how it can feel, in the words of actress Alyssa Milano, “like an elephant is sitting on my chest.” We’ve also known for a while that some COVID-19 patients’ hearts are taking a beating, too—but over the past few weeks, the evidence has strengthened that cardiac damage can happen even among people who have never displayed symptoms of coronavirus infection....

A twist on a revolutionary gene-editing technique may make it possible to modify plant genomes while sidestepping national biosafety regulations, South Korean researchers say. Plant scientists have been quick to experiment with the popular CRISPR/Cas9 technique, which uses an enzyme called Cas9, guided by two RNA strands, to precisely cut segments of DNA in a genome. By disabling specific genes in wheat and rice, for example, researchers hope to make disease-resistant strains of the crops....

Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words By Randall Munroe. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015 How Dogs Work By Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein. University of Chicago Press, 2015 A Natural History of Wine By Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle. Yale University Press, 2015 The Gulf of Fire: The Destruction of Lisbon, Or Apocalypse in the Age of Science and Reason By Mark Molesky. Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 The Secret Lives of Bats: My Adventures with the World’s Most Misunderstood Mammals By Merlin Tuttle....

What mom eats during pregnancy dramatically influences not only the health of her kids but future generations as well. That’s the conclusion of a new report in Science linking poor diet among pregnant mice moms to glucose intolerance and pancreatic issues in both mice offspring and grandsons. These symptoms of mouse diabetes were passed on through generations of mice, even without any apparent alterations in the letters that comprise organisms’ genetic codes—A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s....

After more than 20 years as a professional paleontologist, I know how lucky I am to spend my days studying dinosaurs. In times when so many people can barely afford the basic necessities, how can I possibly justify using taxpayers’ money to study animals that vanished millions of years ago? What can they teach us about today’s world? Aren’t they irrelevant to modern-day problems? The truth is, paleontology is anything but irrelevant....

Six months after a civil uprising began in Libya, Col. Muammar Qadhafi, the nation’s longtime leader, finally seems to have lost his grip on the country he ruled for more than 40 years. Did he also, at some point, lose his grip on reality? As the conflict spread across Libya, Qadhafi made a number of bizarre statements to members of the media, denying that demonstrators were angry with the government and even claiming that any conflict that might be unfolding was the result of drinks spiked with hallucinogenic drugs....

During the height of the space race in the 1960s, legend has it, NASA scientists realized that pens could not function in space. They needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent years and millions of taxpayer dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity. But their crafty Soviet counterparts, so the story goes, simply handed their cosmonauts pencils....

Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Adapted from What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, by Jonathan Balcombe. Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Balcombe. While diving off the Micronesian archipelago of Pulau, evolutionary biologist Giacomo Bernardi witnessed something unusual and was lucky enough to capture it on film. An orange-dotted tuskfish (Choerodon anchorago) uncovered a clam buried in the sand by blowing water at it, picked up the mollusk in its mouth and carried it to a large rock 30 yards away....

Gigantoraptor erlianensis stood more than 16 feet (five meters) tall and weighed a ton and a half, or roughly 1,400 kilograms. Featuring a toothless beak on its head and a short tail for balance, the enormous birdlike dinosaur measured more than 26 feet (eight meters) in length. Living more than 65 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, this big bird precursor has complicated the seemingly shrinking descent from Archaeopteryx to the modern sparrow....

Time travel has been a popular science-fiction theme since H. G. Wells wrote his celebrated novel The Time Machine in 1895. But can it really be done? Is it possible to build a machine that would transport a human being into the past or future? For decades, time travel lay beyond the fringe of respectable science. In recent years, however, the topic has become something of a cottage industry among theoretical physicists....

After a fight, most people want their partner to either disengage or to engage more meaningfully, according to a study of 953 married or cohabitating couples in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. Which strategy to use depends on your partner’s underlying concern in the argument: is he or she perceiving a threat or neglect? A perceived threat encompasses anything that puts a partner’s status in doubt, such as blame, criticism or demands, explains lead author Keith Sanford, a psychologist at Baylor University....

In this month’s Scientific American science writer Ed Yong explores new research on stereotype threat—the fear of confirming derogatory stereotypes about one’s social group. Such anxiety can undermine people’s performance in school, sports and the workplace. A girl in an advanced math class, for example, might worry that she will not test as well as the boys, because of the stereotype that boys are better at math. Her concerns might distract her and tax her mental resources so that she performs below her abilities....

In the March 2015 Scientific American, Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University philosopher and cognitive scientist, and Deb Roy, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and Twitter’s chief media scientist, write about the society-altering consequences of digital transparency. Modern institutions—governments, corporations, armies, churches—developed in what the authors call an “epistemologically murky environment, in which most knowledge was local, secrets were easily kept and individuals were, if not blind, myopic.” But that environment is changing....

By Simon Johnson STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Iceland raised its alert warning level to maximum on Friday after what it called a small eruption in the Bardarbunga volcano system but said there was no sign of ash that could affect air travel in Europe. In 2010, an ash cloud from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, in a different region of Iceland, closed much of Europe’s air space for six days. Iceland’s largest volcanic system, which cuts a 190-km (118-mile)-long and up to 25-km-(15....

LONG, SLOW BURN Regarding Ulrich Kraft’s “Burned Out”: Herbert J. Freudenberger may have coined the term “burnout syndrome” in the 1970s, but he was not the first to notice the phenomenon. In The Wealth of Nations in 1776, Adam Smith observed that many people could only work at full output for a small number of years and that it was the bosses’ job “rather to moderate, than to animate” their workers....

By Adam Mann of Nature magazineNASA should be revitalized “not just with dollars, but with clear aims and a larger purpose,” US President Barack Obama said last April, after cancelling the previous administration’s under-resourced Constellation programme of rockets and capsules for human space flight. But 12 months later, money and clarity are in short supply at the agency, which finds itself hamstrung by a budget showdown and buffeted by conflicting messages from Obama and the US Congress about the next steps in human space flight (see ‘Space wars’)....

By Rex DaltonArchaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.The tool shows that people were living in North America well before the widespread Clovis culture of 12,900 to 12,400 years ago, says archaeologist Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon in Eugene.Studies of sediment and radiocarbon dating showed the bone’s age. Jenkins presented the finding late last month in a lecture at the University of Oregon....

Pregnant women exposed to phthalates, a group of hormone-mimicking chemicals found in personal care products and processed foods, may have an increased risk of preterm delivery, a new study suggests. The study included 130 women in the Boston area who had given birth early, before 37 weeks of pregnancy, and 352 women who delivered at full term between 2006 and 2008. The researchers measured the levels of common phthalates such as DEHP in the women’s urine up to three times during their pregnancies....