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The nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station in Japan that were crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami are a lot like reactors in the U.S. They are a common, if not exactly modern, General Electric design that harnesses nuclear fission to boil water and drive steam turbines to generate electricity. The same reactor designs and containment system are in use across the U.S., for instance at the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant near Athens, Ala....

PROFILE NAME Tejal Desai TITLE Professor of bioengineering and therapeutic sciences LOCATION University of California, San Francisco All creatures struggle with a common problem: they must let in nutrients and vent wastes while also keeping pathogens and poisons out. At a cellular level, humans and other vertebrates safeguard their bodies using “tight junctions,” watertight bonds between adjacent cells. Tight junctions are in almost all our tissues and even help waterproof our skin....

A tool originally developed for quantum computers can now map temperature changes within a living cell. The technique exploits quantum effects in tiny diamond crystals, or ’nanodiamonds’, to detect changes down to a few thousandths of a degree. The researchers were also able to heat selected parts of the cell using a laser. “We now have a tool to control temperature on a cellular level, and we can study how biological systems react to temperature change,” says Peter Maurer, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a member of the team publishing the result today in Nature....

Tanzania’s vice president, wearing sunglasses and a bright yellow hijab, leaned over the waist-high concrete sea wall along Barack Obama Drive and gazed upon an expanse of Indian Ocean. It was June 5, World Environment Day, and Samia Suluhu Hassan had traveled to the busy roadside in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania’s economic capital, to mark the completion of one of the country’s most visible climate adaptation projects. More than 11 years had passed since Tanzania adopted its National Adaptation Program of Action, which identified “the construction of artificial structures, e....

Earth may have had a second, smaller moon that smacked into the larger one, which explains why one side of the moon is more rugged than the other. Searching remote mountains in Borneo, scientists discover a group of brightly colored rainbow toads, a species last seen in 1924 and believed to be extinct. Elephants have social networks ranging from four to 16 “friends.” As with people, the smaller the circle, the stronger and more loyal the bond....

The Internet has ushered in an era of largely unfettered access to a wide variety of information. Yet, although so much of what the Internet has to offer is gratis, access to the Internet itself has never been free. This dichotomy lies at the heart of the prolonged and hairy “net neutrality” debate over what Internet service providers (ISPs) should charge for their services and what role those companies should play in managing the flow of information over their infrastructures....

The world will consume far more fossil fuels than what’s anticipated under the Paris Agreement, in an oil and gas splurge that threatens to overshoot global goals on climate change, the United Nations and other research groups warned this week. Production targets for coal, oil and natural gas will put the world on course to release more than double the amount of carbon dioxide that scientists say would result in 1....

15: What drives some people to break the law and even endanger their lives for the sake of their art? The new documentary Man on Wire delves into the mind of the man who perpetrated what some consider to be the “artistic crime of the century.” In 1974 a tightrope walker named Philippe Petit performed a high-wire routine between the two towers of the World Trade Center for nearly an hour before the New York City police department managed to coax him down....

HOW MANY TIMES have you heard people say that something is “black and white,” meaning it is simple or crystal clear? And because black and white are so obviously distinct, it would be only natural for us to assume that understanding how we see them must be equally straightforward. We would be wrong. The seeming ease of perceiving the two color extremes hides a formidable challenge confronting the brain every time we look at a surface....

When Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson made their Nobel Prize–winning big bang discovery 50 years ago, there was no “aha” moment. Instead, they were frustrated that their telescope was apparently malfunctioning, detecting a background layer of “noise” that muddied the real data they were after. It was only later, when they realized their noise was actually some of the earliest light ever created—the so-called cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation—that the astronomers appreciated what they had done....

By Kevin MurphyKansas City, Missouri (Reuters) - A violent Halloween storm from the U.S. Gulf Coast to the eastern Great Lakes killed at least three people, two in Texas and one in Tennessee, and contributed to the overturning of a school bus in a rain-swollen creek in Kansas.Strong winds and heavy rains swept through the region and wind gusts of up to 50 miles per hour were still forecast for Friday afternoon in some regions....

Not long ago, the idea that climate change could prompt whole ecosystems to move was introduced to researchers as “climate velocity.” It’s meant to show how quickly trees, plants and animals will have to migrate to find friendly temperatures. Now a new analysis is estimating the pace of species movement because of both climate change and land use, revealing new pressures that stem from local decisions to build, plant and cut on the warming landscape....

To curb emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases, society must switch from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy. But the intermittent nature of sources such as solar and wind means that energy production is beholden to the rhythms of nature, which do not always coincide with when people use the most energy. To keep demand from straining the grid during peak hours, some utilities try to curtail electricity use by charging higher rates during those periods....

Talk about making waves. Two years ago medical researcher John Ioannidis of the University of Ioannina in Greece offered mathematical “proof” that most published research results are wrong. Now, statisticians using similar methods found—not surprisingly—that the more researchers reproduce a finding, the better chance it has of being true. Another research team says researchers have to draw conclusions from imperfect information, but offers a way to draw the line between justified and unjustified risks....

For a sex toy, the vibrator’s roots seem amazingly antiseptic and clinical. Prescribed as a cure for the curious disease hysteria, the device for decades found clinical application as a supposed medical therapy. Derived from the Greek word for “uterus,” hysteria occurred in women with pent-up sexual energy—or so healers and early physicians believed. Nuns, widows and spinsters were particularly susceptible, but by the Victorian era many married women had fallen prey as well....

Left Behind Ned Flanders’s Leftorium would not have stood a chance in Victorian England. Left-handers made up only about 3 percent of the population there, as compared with about 11 percent today globally [see “Taking Sides”; SciAm, April 2006, and “Left Out”; SciAm Mind, December 2005]. Researchers came to this conclusion after watching documentary films about northern England from 1897 to 1913, some of which showed people waving (a better indicator of handedness than writing)....

Many of us are familiar with the feeling of passing someone in a supermarket or making eye contact on a crowded subway and wondering, Do I know that person? As we move through life we are tasked with remembering and recognizing thousands of faces, and a study released today in Science reveals our brains improve at this as we reach adulthood. Researchers had children and young adults complete a combination of behavioral tests and anatomical and functional brain scans....

If I dare to give the coronavirus credit for anything, I would say it has made people more conscious of the air they breathe. A friend texted me recently after going for a jog in the foothills near Boise, Idaho, writing: “My lungs are burning … explain what’s happening!!!” A wildfire was burning to the east of town—one of hundreds of fires that were sending smoke and ash through communities in hot, dry western states....

Every year new generations of corals build their homes on the stony remnants of their ancestors. Pulling calcium—or strontium—from the surrounding seawater, they form calcium carbonate shells that give coral reefs their unique shapes and structures. But, much like tree rings, these coral reefs also lay down layer after layer of environmental records, a catalogue of the sea’s temperature and other information. By studying a record of such coral cores stretching back roughly 6,500 years, scientists at the Australian National University have pieced together how climate change may affect the weather in their region....

Editor’s Note (1/17/22): A member of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission triggered an uproar last week by saying that gas stoves were a hazard and that the agency was considering regulating or banning them. To clarify the risks, Scientific American is republishing this recent article from the November 2022 issue, which reports on studies about indoor air pollution linked to gas stoves and how such pollution can worsen respiratory illnesses....