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My restaurant, Miya’s Sushi, is just a few miles from Long Island Sound. An important goal of ours is to have our cuisine return to the roots of sushi, meaning simply to use what we have available where we live. Often what we find now are invasive species—unwanted plants and animals that humans have introduced to ecosystems. Nationwide, invasive species such as the wild boar and Asian carp are destroying farms and fisheries, causing economic damage that has been estimated at $120 billion a year....

AN EMOTIONLESS MIND Thank you for the balanced article on psychopaths [“Inside the Mind of a Psychopath,” by Kent A. Kiehl and Joshua W. Buckholtz]. All too often I hear people with this condition referred to as monsters or with the Dark Ages moniker of being “evil.” I have a good friend who has this problem, and it is heartbreaking to see such an intelligent young man have brushes with the law because he does not seem to have the ability to understand common social codes of ethics....

“William S. Meade, who is said to have made a fortune of $250,000 in a process discovered by him for the preservation of meat, recently died in a New York lodging house, penniless. After he made his fortune, while on the Pacific coast, he befriended an old sea captain, who claimed to know the resting place of a sunken treasure boat, and upon the captain’s death Meade was bequeathed a number of charts and directions in cipher for locating the craft....

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness Susannah Cahalan Free Press, 2012 ($25) In early 2009 Cahalan woke up in a hospital with electrodes glued to her head. She was restrained to the bed and unable to breathe a word, with a security guard keeping a watchful eye on her. Just days earlier she had been living a dream life—a 24-year-old rising star reporter at the New York Post, with a serious boyfriend and a loving family....

Knitting and weaving artificial muscles could help create soft exoskeletons that people with disabilities could wear under their clothes to help them walk, according to new research. Textile processing is one of humanity’s oldest technologies, but in recent years there has been renewed interest in using it to create “smart” textiles that can do everything from harvest power from the environment to monitor our health. Now, Swedish researchers have created actuators—devices that convert energy into motion—from cellulose yarn coated with a polymer that reacts to electricity....

The price of petrol may have fallen, but car makers are still keen to improve fuel efficiency. Building vehicles with lighter materials is one approach: trimming a car’s weight by one-tenth can boost fuel economy by 6–8%. But steel remains the preferred construction material for cars—other metals are costlier and harder to work with. The challenge is to find a light, strong, ductile steel alloy, often made by exchanging some of the iron for aluminium and other elements....

By Amanda Mascarelli of Nature magazine As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to climb, most climate models project that the world’s oceans and trees will keep soaking up more than half of the extra CO2. But researchers report this week that the capacity for land plants to absorb more CO2 will be much lower than previously thought, owing to limitations in soil nutrients. Because plants take up CO2 during photosynthesis, it has long been assumed that they will provide a large carbon ‘sink’ to help offset increases in atmospheric CO2 caused by the burning of fossil fuels....

Forgoing a test to detect prostate cancer could mean that three times as many men would fail to have the disease detected before it spreads to other organs, according to a paper in Cancer on July 30. This new finding arrives just months after the U.S. Preventative Service Task Force issued a recommendation against using PSA screening. The task force gave PSA screening a grade of “D,” meaning it does more harm than good for most men....

Pregnant rats exposed to an industrial pollutant passed on a variety of diseases to their unexposed great-grandkids, according to a study published Wednesday. Washington State University scientists found that third-generation offspring of pregnant rats exposed to dioxin had high rates of kidney and ovarian diseases as well as early onset of puberty. They also found changes in the great-grandsons’ sperm. The great-grandkids – the first generation not directly exposed to dioxin – inherited their health conditions through cellular changes controlling how their genes were turned on and off, the researchers reported....

Tax Dollars at Work Despite Barack Obama appointing scientists to top posts, I hardly think this qualifies him personally to be named in the “Scientific American 10.” His inclusion pales beside the favor bestowed to the others on the list who have actually done some real work for science and humanity. Catherine McBride-Bergum Virginia, Minn. Although your infatuation with Obama is most likely impervious to facts, I would like to point out that federal R&D spending increased 41 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars over the course of the Bush administration....

STICKING TO CLIMATE SCIENCE As an undergraduate physics major in the mid-1980s at the University of California, Berkeley, I knew about Richard Muller—the physics professor who was the subject of Michael D. Lemonick’s interview, “‘I Stick to the Science’”—and his controversial theory that a “death star” was responsible for major mass extinctions. Later, as a graduate student studying climate, I became aware of Muller’s work attempting to overthrow the traditional Earth orbital theory of the ice ages—that, too, didn’t pan out....

By Jonathan Kaminsky ARLINGTON, Washington (Reuters) - Rescue workers sifted through mucky rubble on Tuesday amid dwindling hopes of finding any more survivors from among scores of people still missing from a devastating weekend mudslide in Washington state that killed at least 14. About a dozen workers searched overnight for as many as 176 people who have been reported missing since a rain-soaked hillside collapsed on Saturday morning, swallowing dozens of homes near Oso, Snohomish County Executive John Lovick said....

With an injection of nanoscale devices as fine as grains of pollen, two biotechnology researchers have given mice the ability to detect near-infrared light—something long believed possible only for a few animals including certain snakes, insects and bats, along with humans using special equipment. One of the scientists, Gang Han, a biochemist at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, calls the experimental rodents “Super mice.” The team reported their results Thursday in Cell....

New subfields in astronomy tend to follow a particular sequence: Something new is observed. Researchers scratch their heads, then look for more examples of it. At first, each discovery in the new category—say, an exoplanet or gravitational-wave event—generates excitement. Eventually they begin to feel routine. But that is when the science gets interesting: with enough examples, patterns emerge, and inaccurate hypotheses are weeded out. In 2020 the study of fast radio bursts (FRBs) has crested to that point....

By Adam Mann Two trials of spacecraft have successfully unfurled their solar sails, and demonstrated that radiation from sunlight can power them through interplanetary space.Solar sails use photons from the sun to propel spacecraft at high speeds. On January 20, the small lightweight spacecraft NanoSail-D deployed a 10-square-meter gleaming sail in low-Earth orbit.Shortly after, on January 26, engineers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) announced the extension of their solar-sail mission IKAROS....

In his Allegory of the Cave, Greek philosopher Plato described prisoners who have spent their entire lives chained to the wall of a dark cavern. Behind the prisoners lies a flame, and between the flame and prisoners parade objects that cast shadows onto a wall in the prisoners’ field of view. These two-dimensional shadows are the only things that the prisoners have ever seen—their only reality. Their shackles have prevented them from perceiving the true world, a realm with one additional dimension to the world that they know, a dimension rich with complexity and—unbeknownst to the prisoners—capable of explaining all that they see....

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the 1999 book The Science of Star Wars by Jeanne Cavelos. The Death Star’s planet-destroying weapon is said in the Star Wars Encyclopedia to be a super-laser. While a laser is basically just light, it is light that can be focused onto a precise spot and can have high, extremely concentrated power. Lasers can produce a steady beam for long periods, or they can produce a very intense beam in short pulses, occurring thousands or millions of times per second....

Archaeology has a representation problem. For most of the time that scholars have been probing the human past, they have focused mainly on the activities of men to the exclusion of women. There are a couple reasons for this bias. One is that the kinds of artifacts that tend to preserve well are made of inorganic materials such as stone or metal, and many are associated with behaviors stereotypically linked to men, such as hunting....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. A bomb cyclone is a large, intense midlatitude storm that has low pressure at its center, weather fronts and an array of associated weather, from blizzards to severe thunderstorms to heavy precipitation. It becomes a bomb when its central pressure decreases very quickly—by at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. Two famed meteorologists, Fred Sanders and John Gyakum, gave this pattern its name in a 1980 study....

By Aaron Ross The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Thursday that it will launch emergency yellow fever vaccination campaigns along the border between Angola and Democratic Republic of Congo and in the Congolese capital Kinshasa next month. The worst yellow fever outbreak in decades has killed about 345 people in Angola, while Congo declared an epidemic in Kinshasa and two other provinces on Monday after reporting 67 confirmed cases and more than 1,000 other suspected cases....