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In my Scientific American column this month I argued against the notion that traditional movies, where we all sit and face the same screen, are dead. Yes, virtual reality (VR) headsets are cool for movies—they let you turn and look around inside a scene—and great for games. But for storytelling? Not so much, because the director has no way to direct your attention. Here’s a look at some of the first VR “movies” and how they tried to solve the attention-directing problem....

You’re seeing the signs in pharmacies and perhaps around your workplace. Your doctor’s office may be calling to schedule an appointment. It’s just that time. Flu vaccination efforts are in full swing. But you may have been hearing puzzling things about flu shots over the past couple of years. While the flu is a common illness, that hardly means the science around it is static. Some recent studies have suggested that getting a yearly shot may actuallydiminish the benefit of successive vaccinations....

Today, the Arctic is synonymous with “cold.” But a new study suggests the polar region has experienced periods of intense warmth over the past 2.8 million years that may have been hot enough to melt the Greenland ice sheet. Scientists already knew that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average. But the new study, based on a sediment core drilled from a Russian lake, suggests the far north’s climate is even more sensitive than researchers suspected....

The Web’s wealth of information would lose some of its luster if you read it only one line at a time. Yet this is exactly how blind and other vision-impaired people today must experience the Web when they use electronic Braille displays connected to their computers. Braille displays use electromechanically controlled pins, as opposed to the lights in a conventional computer monitor, to convey information. Here is how: Software gathers a Web page’s content from the computer’s operating system, converts the words and images into a digital version of Braille and then represents that via a touchable row of finger-sized rectangular cells lined up side by side like dominoes....

BOULDER, Colo. — Researchers have traced the severe winter droughts that struck California from 2013 to 2015 and this year’s unusually wet winter that caused widespread flooding in the state to the same phenomenon: wavelike patterns of winds in the upper atmosphere that circle the globe. Two scientists here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) found that a distinctive pattern formed by the wave blocked incoming Pacific storms from coming onshore in the winters of 2013 and 2014, keeping the state unusually dry....

“I’ve been doing combative stuff since I was born,” says Geordie Rose, leaning back in a chair in his small, windowless office in Burnaby, Canada, as he describes how he has spent most of his life making things difficult for himself. Until his early 20s, that meant an obsession with wrestling — the sport that, he claims, provides the least reward for the most work. More recently, says Rose, now 41, “that’s been D-Wave in a nutshell: an unbearable amount of pain and very little recognition”....

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was no big bang in biology. In the 18th century, several researchers had already developed similar ideas, included among them, Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather. Based on the fossils of extinct animal species, he had postulated as early as 1794 that all life had originated from small, microscopic mollusks. In the first half of the 19th century, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier developed his theory of catastrophes....

Imagine a medical emergency on a flight to the moon, an asteroid or Mars—it may not be as catastrophic as the crisis in the film Gravity, but perhaps an astronaut is bleeding. Surgery can always be challenging, but it would be even more so in microgravity, because blood droplets can float, potentially obscuring a caregiver’s field of view. Now researchers have tested a novel way to potentially control bleeding during surgery in space by isolating wounds under transparent watertight domes filled with fluid....

IN THE CLASSIC 1936 cult film Reefer Madness, well-adjusted high school students who try marijuana suddenly sink into a life of addiction, promiscuity, aggression, academic failure, homicide and mental illness. The movie concludes with the ominous warning that “The dread marijuana may be reaching forth next for your son or daughter … or yours … or YOURS!” Newspaper headlines of the day often reflected a similar sentiment. On February 10, 1938, a headline in the Beloit (Wisc....

By Katy Migiro NAIROBI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Emergency food aid, normal rainfall and the start of the harvest have helped to stave off famine in South Sudan, the latest analysis shows, but there is a risk of mass starvation in early 2015. Aid agencies scrambled to avert famine in South Sudan by launching the world’s largest humanitarian operation after fighting erupted in the world’s youngest country in December. Some 10,000 people have died and 1....

As a rule of thumb, animals avoid smacking into things. But rules of thumb, like the actual thumbs of unskilled carpenters, are made to be broken. And so researchers at Sweden’s Lund University were recently surprised to find that the visual systems of some animals actually make collisions within their environment more, rather than less, likely. The Lund scientists have a long-standing interest in how insects see the world, nay, the universe....

Infections lurking on the margins of civilization are becoming more likely to cause outbreaks as the climate changes, researchers say. Ravens, rodents and rattlesnakes are moving to new locales as rainfall and temperatures shift over time (ClimateWire, Dec. 14, 2011). The pathogens and parasites that infect these organisms move, as well, creating the risk of these diseases spilling over from one species to another. This host-parasite relationship is a bellwether for broader changes in the environment, and understanding it could help people anticipate and respond to deadly diseases and economically devastating blights....

Key concepts Temperature Heat transfer Adaptation Insulation Fatty tissue Introduction Have you ever wondered how whales and other marine mammals survive and keep warm in the cold oceans? Warm-blooded mammals can live in these chilly conditions because their bodies have some cool warmth-saving adaptations, thanks to generations of natural selection. In other words, to pass on characteristics (via their genes), the predecessors of modern marine mammals had to overcome different challenges to reproduce, and their descendants received the genes that allowed for their survival....

Editor’s Note: This “Sustainable Developments” column will be printed in the December 2008 issue of Scientific American. The origin of the U.S. financial crisis is that commercial banks and investment banks lent vast sums—trillions of dollars—for housing purchases and consumer loans to borrowers ill-equipped to repay. The easy lending pushed up housing prices around the U.S., which then ratcheted still higher when speculators bought houses on the expectation of yet further price increases....

Human-caused climate change will double the frequency of La Niñas by the end of the century, resulting in floods, droughts and other extreme weather events, finds a new study based on climate modeling. La Niñas, which are the cooler cousins of El Niños, are weather patterns associated with a temperature drop in the central Pacific Ocean. In the past, extreme La Niñas have caused droughts in the southwestern United States, flash flooding in Venezuela, flooding in China and the deaths of thousands of people....

BRAINY BENEFITS The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain by Brock L. and Fernette F. Eide. Hudson Street Press, 2011 ($25.95) Perhaps the most challenging part of being dyslexic is the misconception that it makes people unintelligent or slow. In response, Brock and Fernette Eide have delivered a compelling call to action in their new book The Dyslexic Advantage: it is time to stop classifying dyslexia as a learning disability and start appreciating that different brain-wiring patterns allow people to process information in unique ways....

Joint flexibility is an oft-coveted trait that provides a special advantage to dancers and athletes, but there can be too much of this good thing. A growing body of research suggests a surprising link between high levels of flexibility and anxiety. A study published last year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology is among the most recent to confirm the association, finding that people with hypermobile joints have heightened brain activity in anxiety regions....

Signs of the gas phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere have faded—but they’re still there, according to a new data analysis. In September, an international team of astronomers made headlines when it reported finding phosphine—a potential marker of life—in the planet’s atmosphere. Several studies questioning the observations and conclusions quickly followed. Now, the same team has reanalysed part of its data, citing a processing error in the original data set. The researchers confirmed the phosphine signal, but say that it’s fainter than before....

In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens’s problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended....

The infamous NASA tool bag lost in space during a November 2008 International Space Station (ISS) maintenance mission left the crew with one less grease gun and no way to replace the missing tool. In a few years astronauts may be able to restock lost or damaged instruments by simply 3-D printing new ones. NASA will test the feasibility of 3-D printing in a confined microgravity environment early next June when it sends a microwave-size printer to the ISS for a series of experiments producing plastic and composite parts and tools....