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Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Now available on iPad SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is partnering with Science Debate (www.sciencedebate.org) and more than a dozen leading science and engineering organizations to inject more discussion about critical science issues into the U....

Roughly 550 million years ago the first complex animals, such as trilobites, appear in the fossil record. Many scientists have concluded that an increase in the amount of atmospheric oxygen was critical to the relatively sudden evolution of these animals. They knew that photosynthetic organisms had been producing oxygen for hundreds of millions of years, but what might have led to the apparently rapid accumulation of the stuff in the atmosphere was a mystery....

By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON, March 3 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Obama administration on Thursday in rebuffing a bid by 20 states to halt an Environmental Protection Agency rule to curb emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants from power plants. The action came about a month after the high court put on hold federal regulations to curb carbon dioxide emissions mainly from coal-fired power plants, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s strategy to combat climate change....

By Zeeya MeraliA hidden partnership between two of the hottest topics in physics – quantum entanglement and chaos theory – may have been uncovered by a series of ingenious experiments with caesium atoms. The relationship could provide clues about where the quantum realm ends and the classical world begins.Chaos theory describes how the slightest change in the starting conditions of a system can have dramatic effects on how it develops. It’s usually explained using the ‘butterfly effect’, in which the atmospheric changes caused by the beating of a butterfly’s wings in one location could eventually lead to the production of a tornado in another....

Fourteen-year-old Nicole, whose name I changed for her privacy, told her mother every day for years that she wanted to end her own life. Between suicide attempts were more psychiatric hospital visits than she or her mother could count. She refused to get out of bed, shower, or go to school, missing sixty school days in a single year. In one visit with her therapist, she admitted to praying every night that she would not wake up the next morning....

On December 2, the centennial anniversary of Einstein’s publication of his general theory of relativity, science fans everywhere will reflect on this amazing act of genius that fundamentally reshaped our understanding of gravity and introduced the world to the curved nature of spacetime. But the theory was not born, fully formed, in some Eureka! moment. Einstein chipped away at it for years. He was finally driven to complete it by a fierce (though collegial) rivalry with the mathematician David Hilbert, who had listened to Einstein describe his ideas and then proceeded to work out many of the equations himself [see “How Einstein Reinvented Reality” by Walter Isaacson, Scientific American, September 2015]....

As I write this, it’s December and it’s Munich. I am at the Center for Mathematical Philosophy to attend a conference that promises to answer the question “Why trust a theory?” The meeting is organized by the Austrian philosopher Richard Dawid, whose recent book String Theory and the Scientific Method caused some upset among physicists. String theory is currently the most popular idea for a unified theory of the [fundamental physics] interactions....

WORMWOOD, Artemisia absinthium, is shown in James Sowerby’s 1803 handcolored engraving. Oil of wormwood was extracted from the herb’s leaves, flowers and stem; it gave absinthe a distinctively bitter taste. Wormwood oil includes thujone, which can cause hallucinations, convulsions and permanent damage to the nervous system. DILUTION of the alcohol concentration of absinthe caused precipitation of a colloidal suspension of terpenes, of which thujone is one. The ritual of presentation involved pouring cold water over a sugar cube placed on a slotted spoon....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. After travelling for nearly 10 years, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is finally set to fly past Pluto in humankind’s first close encounter with the dwarf planet. But the spacecraft is at least a decade old (arguably more like two decades, as spacecraft need to use tried-and-tested components). If it had been built with today’s technology, New Horizons could have been able to send back a lot more data a lot faster....

About 550 million years ago animals were relegated to the seas. Microbes and larger multicellular organisms covered much of the seafloor in an organic mat similar to pond scum. On top of this settled bigger animals, including Dickinsonia—a genus of perplexing creatures shaped like dinner plates, round bath mats and flattened coins. Scientists have long speculated about what Earth’s life was like half a billion years ago, during the Ediacaran period, and they are steadily finding more clues....

Rich Jenkins opens a child’s picture book and aims a camera phone at a page depicting a cartoon panda bear that is gesturing toward a set of Chinese characters. As Jenkins and I view the page through the cell phone screen, the printed panda suddenly erupts into a 3-D video version that points at the first symbol, pronounces it in Mandarin and then defines it in English. Jenkins, who leads Media Power, a New York City–based firm that develops mobile communications applications, smiles at my rather startled reaction....

Stem cells have been hailed by scientists as the great hope to one day prevent, halt and even reverse damage from diabetes, spinal cord injuries and degenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Stem cells obtained from human embryos seem to offer the best chance of new therapies, because unlike other stem cells they have the ability to morph into almost any type of tissue. But researchers complain that political roadblocks are keeping them from determining the full potential of these cells....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory and the place famous most recently for the discovery of the Higgs boson, is celebrating its sixtieth birthday today. The name CERN originally was the French acronym for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research, and its convention officially came into force on September 29, 1954. In the wake of a war that had torn the continent apart, a small group of scientists and policy-makers created CERN in an attempt to use fundamental research to reunite Europe....

China’s greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel combustion could be as much as 14 percent lower than previously thought, according to a sweeping new study released yesterday. The study, published in the journal Nature, is considered the most accurate assessment so far of emissions levels in China. And, the authors said, while the findings don’t change China’s status as the world’s largest emitter of climate change pollution, they could have serious policy implications ahead of key U....

SAN FRANCISCO – Just before the presidential election in 2008, Lisa Hoyos began thinking about the year 2035. She was driving to pick up her son when she heard a radio broadcast how climate change could affect food chains. In the marine world, it warned, there could be a systemwide collapse by that future year, resulting in seafood scarcity. Hoyos’ new baby, Cruz, then 4 months old, was riding in the back seat....

The seasonal thawing of carbon dioxide ice near Mars’ north pole carves grooves in the region’s sand dunes, three new studies reveal. The discovery, made using observations from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft (MRO), reinforces that the Red Planet’s surface continues to be transformed today, even though Mars’ volcanoes have died out and its liquid surface water apparently dried up long ago. “It’s an amazingly dynamic process,” Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz....

KATMANDU, Nepal — The streets of this crowded tourist city are like a slow-moving showroom of the auto industry, with packs of buses, cars, taxis and motorbikes chugging along. But if you take a closer look, you will find that some of the smaller buses have only one front wheel. They have no exhaust, and they don’t chug. Emblazoned with a sign that says “Save Kathmandu,” they are among the smallest and least-familiar models in the world’s growing fleet of electric vehicles: the battery-powered “autorickshaw....

Imagine you confront this problem. You want to build a house in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where winter temperatures sometimes dip to –40 degrees Fahrenheit. Your house can use only renewable energy, and it has to cost less to build than one powered by fossil fuels. Oh, and it needs to have a room that is warm enough to grow bananas year-round. Most people would begin to think about solutions by shopping around for the necessary materials but not Amory Lovins, the renowned energy efficiency advocate....

By Zeeya Merali A metal alloy masquerading as a glass is the first material to be fabricated that is as strong and as tough as the toughest steel. The feat could eventually see such materials replace steel in buildings, cars or bridges. The terms ‘strength’ and ’toughness’ may be used almost interchangeably in everyday life, but until now, no materials have been found that display both these characteristics. Some materials, such as glass, are strong – that is, they are scratch-resistant and it is difficult to permanently bend them out of shape when you place a heavy load on them – but they also tend to be brittle....

So very calm under pressure. (Credit: Call Of Duty/YouTube Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET) When it was announced last week that Megan Fox would be in the new Call Of Duty: Ghosts ad, many reacted with a shudder of disbelief. This would be the first time that a woman would star in a Call Of Duty ad. Could she possibly act better than Kobe Bryant? I can put you at your ease....