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Editor’s note (11/16/15): Following the terrorist attacks in Paris on November 13, Scientific American is republishing the following article, which originally ran after the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a Parisian newspaper, in January 2015. From France to Nigeria, the world is reeling from a wave of deadly terrorist attacks. As governments scramble to respond, researchers and analysts are attempting to calculate what the terrorism risk is and how it is changing....

Key concepts Chemistry Surface tension Water molecules Introduction Have you ever tried to blow a bubble, and no matter how hard you try—that bubble just won’t form? Why does this happen? Why do bubbles form at all? And why is it harder to blow bubbles sometimes? In this activity we’re going to explore how bubbles form, and test the limits of how big our bubbles can get! Background As you may know, bubbles rely on surface tension to hold together....

… so I said that there was, like, no way I’d go out with him unless …wait a sec! … It looks like we’re finally over the Rockies, so I should be there in two hours! … Really? Excellent! … So, anyhow, I told him that he’d better … For many of us, the prospect of spending time trapped in an airline cabin listening to a passenger chatter into a cell phone may evoke thoughts of a 1950s horror-movie-like title: “Cell Phone Hell at 33,000 Feet!...

Two things are thought to be crucial for evolutionary adaptation: genetic diversity and long periods of time, in which advantageous mutations accumulate. So how do invasive species, which often lack genetic diversity, succeed so quickly? Some ecologists are beginning to think that environmental, or ‘epigenetic’, factors might be modifying genes while leaving the genome intact. “There are a lot of different ways for invasive species to do well in novel environments and I think epigenetics is one of those ways,” says Christina Richards, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa....

In 2008, J. David Marley, an engineer who owned a construction firm in Amherst, Mass., had an idea. He had just finished building a large solar array on the rooftop of his downtown office building. The labor and effort to put it up there, he had learned, was much more expensive than if he had built the solar array on the ground. In heavily populated Massachusetts, farmland is relatively rare and only 10% of its food is homegrown....

Astronomers have discovered a new kind of supernova, a star explosion so weak that scientists dubbed it a miniature stellar blast. Supernovas represent the deaths of stars, which collapse in powerful explosions. They generally are classified into two main types; the new class, called Type Iax, “is essentially a mini-supernova,” said lead researcher Ryan Foley, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It’s the runt of the supernova litter.”...

Genetically engineered immune cells can drive an aggressive type of leukemia into retreat, a small clinical trial suggests. The results of the trial — done in five patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia — are published in Science Translational Medicine and represent the latest success for a ‘fringe’ therapy in which a type of immune cell called T cells are extracted from a patient, genetically modified, and then reinfused back. In this case, the T cells were engineered to express a receptor for a protein on other immune cells, known as B cells, found in both healthy and cancerous tissue....

A team of astronomers that last year reported evidence for gravitational waves from the early Universe has now withdrawn the claim. A joint analysis of data recorded by the team’s BICEP2 telescope at the South Pole and by the European spacecraft Planck has revealed that the signal can be entirely attributed to dust in the Milky Way rather than having a more ancient, cosmic origin. The European Space Agency (ESA) announced the long-awaited results on January 30, a day after a summary of it had been unintentionally posted online by French members of the Planck satellite team and then widely circulated before it was taken down....

The Science Of The Next 150 Years: 150 Years in the Future When space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop in 2011, it did not mark, as some worried, the end of human spaceflight. Rather, as the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed early mammals to flourish, retiring the shuttle signals the opening of far grander opportunities for space exploration. Led by ambitious private companies, we are entering the early stages of the migration of our species away from Earth and our adaptation to entire new worlds....

By Timothy Gardner and Susan Cornwell WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A bill to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline failed in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday, sparing President Barack Obama from having to veto legislation that several fellow Democrats supported. The measure fell just short of the 60 votes needed for passage, despite frantic last-minute lobbying by supporters, including Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana who faces a runoff election on Dec....

APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY, Laurel, Md.—At 8:52 P.M. Eastern time, the New Horizons control center here received radio confirmation that the space probe had made—and survived—its closest approach to Pluto, passing 12,500 kilometers above the planet’s sunlit hemisphere.* The transmission was the first since 11:30 P.M. ET last night, ending a radio silence imposed so that the spacecraft could avoid interrupting its observations. The flyby may well break a record for the number of historic milestones set by a single space mission: last of the first visits to the textbook planets in our solar system; most distant object ever visited; first trip to the Kuiper Belt of icy worlds that ring the outer solar system; fastest spacecraft launched; and probably most budgetary deaths and resurrections....

San Diego looked very different back in the Eocene epoch, from about 56 million to 34 million years ago. The area’s now arid climate was warmer and more humid, its lush subtropical forests teeming with primates and marsupials. Now a recently examined fossil adds another creature to the list: a new species of saber-toothed predator. The fossil—the lower jaw of a catlike mammal—was found in 1988 at a construction site in Oceanside, Calif....

Conventional wisdom specifies that the central nervous system—the brain, spinal cord and eye nerves—cannot heal in adults. This thinking no longer holds. Larry I. Benowitz of Children’s Hospital Boston and his colleagues found a molecule that triggers better nerve regeneration than any other studied. The scientists discovered that a protein, oncomodulin, is secreted in damaged eyes by immune cells known as macrophages. They found that oncomodulin, when given with compounds that enhance its activity, can increase nerve regeneration fivefold to sevenfold in rats with injured optic nerves (right)....

By Marie-Louise Gumuchian and Rhys JonesLONDON (Reuters) - A strong storm battered Britain and the Netherlands on Monday, killing three people, cutting power and forcing hundreds of plane and train cancellations as it moved on across mainland Europe.Winds of up to 99 miles per hour (160 km per hour) lashed southern England and Wales, disrupting the travel plans of millions of commuters - the worst storm recorded in Britain in a decade....

Insomniac readers (yes, you reading this at 3 A.M.), please don’t hate me! I just happen to be one of those people who falls asleep minutes after my head hits the pillow and awakens cheery and refreshed when the sunlight filters through the window. I have always counted this as a blessing (so much better than counting sheep) but never so much as I do in view of our special report on circadian rhythms....

The color green—read “environmentally friendly”—now prefaces everything from gasoline to mutual funds. But is there anything truly green about these products other than the profits that they make for their purveyors? In a few instances, industry and the professions have begun to earn their colors. One force steering the chemical industry in this direction is the Green Chemistry Institute (GCI) in Washington, D.C. The GCI has stewardship of the annual Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards....

We have all experienced the “aha” moment when a joke suddenly makes sense, and scientists have long tried to figure out what happens in our brain during that crucial split second. Now a researcher at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has found a window into that state of mind: the eyes. Humor psychologist Richard Lewis (no relation to the comedian) was intrigued by past studies showing that a person’s pupils dilate in proportion to the funniness of a cartoon he or she is looking at....

Key information from this month’s issue: • DIABETES Type 2, or adult-onset, diabetes is on the rise. But now scientists find that the incidence of type 1 diabetes is also soaring at a rate of 3 to 5 percent a year worldwide. Previously called juvenile diabetes, it can be crippling and lead to early death. Though the cause is still a mystery, hygiene, gluten-rich diets and obesity have all been implicated as culprits....

Ignition is close now. Within a year or two the 192 laser beams at the National Ignition Facility (NIF)—the world’s largest and most powerful laser system, a 13-year, $4-billion enterprise—will focus their energy onto a pellet no bigger than a peppercorn. Energy from the laser beams will crush the pellet’s core with such force that the hydrogen isotopes inside will fuse together and release energy, an H-bomb in miniature. The trick has been tried before—and with success....

When two wormholes collide, they could produce ripples in space-time that ricochet off themselves. Future instruments could detect these gravitational “echoes,” providing evidence that these hypothetical tunnels through space-time actually exist, a new paper suggests. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has already detected space-time ripples, called gravitational waves, emanating from merging black holes—discoveries that led to the Nobel Prize in 2017. But while LIGO’s detection was just one of many observations supporting the existence of black holes, these exotic objects still pose theoretical problems....