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In the 1920s Harvard University graduate student Clyde E. Keeler discovered two surprising facts about mice he had bred in his rented attic room. One, all the progeny were completely blind. Two, despite the animals’ blindness, their pupils still constricted in response to ambient light, albeit at a slower rate than did the pupils of sighted mice. Many years later researchers extended Keeler’s observation, showing that mice genetically engineered to lack rods and cones (the light receptors involved in vision) nonetheless reacted to changes in light by adjusting their circadian clock—the internal timer that synchronizes hormone activity, body temperature and sleep....

Dense metropolises of concrete, glass and asphalt are poised to warm faster than their surroundings as the planet heats up. The higher temperatures mean more severe heat waves, which, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are already the deadliest weather phenomenon in the United States. By midcentury, scientists expect between 3,500 and 27,000 additional heat-related deaths. High temperatures make it harder for the body to cool off, and they exacerbate air pollution, leading to more hospital visits from people with vulnerable hearts and lungs, particularly the very young and the elderly....

It’s been three weeks since public-health authorities confirmed a case of monkeypox in the United Kingdom. Since then, more than 400 confirmed or suspected cases have emerged in at least 20 non-African nations, including Canada, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom — the largest outbreak ever seen outside Africa. The situation has scientists on alert, because the monkeypox virus has emerged in separate populations across multiple countries, and there is no obvious link between many of the clusters, raising the possibility of undetected local transmission of the virus....

Smoking tobacco killed 100 million people over the course of the 20th century. It is a leading cause of cancer, heart disease and other ailments. And it is on pace to kill one billion more this century if current trends continue. Yet, quitting smoking is hard to do for a variety of physiological and psychological reasons. New research indicates, however, that a novel drug–based on an older plant cure–aids heavy smokers in their quest to quit....

By the Scientific American staff This week, “Where Are They Now?” columnist Laura Vanderkam and managing editor, online, Ivan Oransky, are in Atlanta for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. ISEF is an annual event that seeks to show off the best of high school science. Sponsored by Intel—which also sponsors the Science Talent Search whose past finalists we started profiling this week—it draws 1,500 students from 51 countries to a host city to show off their work....

Breakthrough Starshot, the $100 million initiative aiming to send robotic missions to nearby stars by the mid-21st century, has achieved what might prove to be a “Sputnik moment” in successfully lofting its first spacecraft—the smallest ever launched and operated in orbit. In 1957 the Soviet Union shocked the world by flying the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, an 83-kilogram metallic orb about twice the size of a basketball that broadcast a radio message to anyone listening down on Earth....

Thousands of years ago, massive elephantlike creatures wandered the landscape, where they gobbled up, and then defecated, fruit. In the process, they may have planted the seeds for early forests. Yet with these creatures long extinct, ecologists have been left with a puzzle: If the same trees are still with us, what—if anything—disperses their seeds to create today’s woodlands? The answer—at least for one type of tree—may lie in the criminal antics of a cunning rodent....

The arrival of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) at the Red Planet in 2006 ushered in a whole new era of Mars observation. With its ultrapowerful HiRISE camera, the orbiter has spied on the Martian surface to study curious features, some of them possibly linked to the presence of water, in unprecedented detail. And along the way HiRISE has also uncovered a few new phenomena. At the top of that list are recurring slope lineae (RSL), which HiRISE scientists discovered in 2011....

There’s a test that we at Lost Women of Science seem to fail again and again: the Finkbeiner test. Named for science writer, Ann Finkbeiner, the Finkbeiner test is a checklist for writing profiles of female scientists without being sexist. It includes rules such as not mentioning her husband’s job or her childcare arrangements or how she was the “first woman to …”—all rules we break regularly on this show. In this episode, Katie Hafner talks to Christie Aschwanden, the science writer who created the test, and Ann Finkbeiner, who inspired it, to find out how they came up with these rules and to see if there might be hope yet for our series....

Whatever your query, desire, or purpose, the internet provides, and all of the complexity of everything from unboxing videos to do-it-yourself blogs are contained within infinitely complex strings of bits. As they travel across time and space at the speed of light, beneath our oceans in fiber optic cables thinner than human hairs, these dense packets of information, instructions for pixels or characters or frames encoded in ones and zeros, unravel to create the digital veneer before you now....

These days, we back up every email we send without even thinking about it, and we look to our computers to tell us the weather rather than looking outside. Today’s teenagers will never know a world without Twitter. At the age of two, my toddler already knows how to start up her favorite videos on my smart phone (the ones of herself, naturally). With the Apple iOS Store adding ~20,000 apps per month, coders all over the world are turning computational problems into executable computer programs ranging from the simple to the extremely complex....

In April 15, 2013 Dove launched a 3-minute video entitled “Dove Real Beauty Sketches.” The video achieved instant popularity and has been watched millions of times — a successful viral campaign which has been widely talked about. In the video, a small group of women are asked to describe their faces to a person whom they cannot see. The person is a forensic artist who is there to draw pictures of the women based on their verbal descriptions....

Greenland, the world’s largest island, holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 23 feet (seven meters). Add the ice sheets of Antarctica and the oceans would deepen more than 200 feet (60 meters). Satellite measurements from space and speed measurements on land confirm that Greenland’s glaciers are melting and on the move. And although the picture is less clear in Antarctica, the global warming seems to be having an impact there, too....

From Future Arctic: Field Notes from a World on the Edge, by Edward Struzik. Copyright © 2015, Island Press. In the summer of 2000, Canadian national park warden Angus Simpson and his colleagues were camped along the north coast of the Yukon Territory near the Alaskan border, conducting a survey of archeological sites along the coast. The sea was dead calm at the time. But they could see in the inky blue sky over the Beaufort Seas the telltale signs of a storm advancing....

For decades scientists thought that, in order to maintain a prosperous and powerful empire along the territories which make up what today is El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and the southwest of Mexico, the Mayan elite must have exerted strict control over the nation’s people, customs and economy. But new signs found at Cerén, an archaeological park located barely 35 kilometers west of San Salvador, tell a very different story of this civilization that emerged near 1,000 B....

Scientists in the United States are nervously watching from the sidelines as the annual budget skirmish heats up in Congress this week. Legislators are back in Washington DC from their August recess with an urgent list of tasks to complete before the country’s fiscal year closes at the end of September. In addition to passing a budget to fund the government, they must also raise the debt ceiling so that the country does not default on its loans, and discuss providing emergency-relief funding for victims of Hurricane Harvey....

By Gwladys FoucheOSLO (Reuters) - Norway is deciding whether to team up with China to explore for oil in Iceland, Icelandic authorities said, setting up a rare cooperation for the two since a diplomatic row over the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.Norway has the right to join an exploration license with Chinese oil firm CNOOC to look for oil in the waters between Iceland and Norway’s Jan Mayen, a tiny speck of land in the Arctic....

Back in 1997, the conservative National Wilderness Institute petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to remove the Hawaiian hawk, or ‘io (Buteo solitarius), from the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The fws finally moved forward on the proposal in February, asking for public comments on the pending delisting. The hawk joined the endangered species list in 1967, fewer than six months after passage of the original Endangered Species Preservation Act, the predecessor to the current ESA....

Most of us start out with the best of intentions. Then we walk right past the fruit bowl in search of the devil’s food cake. Or drink one glass of wine too many. Or, after yet another glass, kiss that co-worker at the holiday party. Unfortunately, life constantly presents us with situations that pit our well-reasoned resolutions against the promise of immediate pleasure. As screen legend Mae West once purred, “I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it....

Editor’s Note: In mid-May, Scientific American will announce the winners of this year’s Scientific American 10. Every Monday, starting April 13, we will profile a previous Scientific American 50 winner. Year in Scientific American 50: 2004 Recognized for: Creating a novel state of matter that may help improve our understanding of superconductors. These are materials in which all resistance to an electrical current disappears at temperatures ranging from near absolute zero to as “warm” as around –170 degrees Fahrenheit (–112 degrees Celsius)....