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Scientists have already established that the hormone oxytocin is a trigger for love and affection. Now they have discovered that babies raised for their first two years in orphanages do not produce the same levels of oxytocin as children raised by their biological parents. In a test designed to elicit cuddling and affection, Seth D. Pollak and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison recruited 18 toddlers adopted from places such as Russia and Romania and an equal number of children with biological parents....

What differentiates mere talent from creative genius? No one knows for sure. We do know, however, that many artistic advances and scientific discoveries come from men and women in their 20s—just old enough to have sufficient technical skills yet young enough to be unencumbered by the habits of older generations. Psychological studies also indicate that highly creative people share an elevated risk of serious mental illness. For certain individuals, such ailments may actually contribute to their soaring achievements....

YELLOWKNIFE, Northwest Territories – The scale of the conservation effort is staggering: 470,000 square miles – half the size of the Louisiana Purchase, five times the size of the U.S. national park system – forever shielded from logging, mining and damming. It is part of an ongoing and unprecedented drive to protect Canada’s northern boreal forests, peat bogs, wetlands and tundra – a drive that is also changing how land managers view their stewardship, civic leaders approach economic growth and companies view their bottom line....

Imagine a 60-year-old man recuperating at home after prostate cancer surgery, drawing comfort from the aged golden retriever beside him. This man might know that a few years ago the director of the National Cancer Institute issued a challenge to cancer re?searchers, urging them to find ways to “eliminate the suffering and death caused by cancer by 2015.” What he probably does not realize, though, is that the pet at his side could be an important player in that effort....

DHARNAI, India—One year ago, environmentalists hailed this tiny village as the future of clean energy in rural India. Today, it is powered by coal. Dharnai, a community of about 3,200 people in eastern India’s Bihar state, had been without electricity for three decades. So when activists with Greenpeace set up a solar-powered microgrid in July of 2014, the excitement was palpable. But, residents said, the problems started almost immediately. When the former chief minister of Bihar state visited to inaugurate the grid, villagers lined up to protest, chanting, “We want real electricity, not fake electricity!...

Scientists know that addictive drugs can mess with the brain’s circuitry and hijack its reward systems, but a July 31 rat study in the journal Neuron shows that psychological factors may be more instrumental in causing these changes than a drug’s chemical effects are. Cocaine use triggers long-lasting cellular memories in the brain, the study found—but only if the user consumes the drug voluntarily. A team led by Billy Chen and Antonello Bonci, both at the University of California, San Francisco, trained three groups of rats to press levers that delivered cocaine, food or sugar....

On the heels of one failed drug trial after another, a recent study suggests people with early Alzheimer’s disease could reap modest benefits from a device that uses magnetic fields to produce small electric currents in the brain. Alzheimer’s is a degenerative brain disorder that afflicts more than 46 million people worldwide. At present there are no treatments that stop or slow its progression, although several approved drugs offer temporary relief from memory loss and other cognitive symptoms by preventing the breakdown of chemical messengers among nerve cells....

Editor’s Note: We are re-posting this article from our March 2008 issue to highlight big news of the year. “Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything.” So ran a Daily Telegraph headline last November. The story circulated and quickly achieved widespread notoriety (even my dentist asked me about it). The physics blogosphere carried long threads of comments attacking and defending the theory and then attacking the tone of the discussion....

Earth developed a magnetic field at least four billion years ago, the latest research shows—more than half a billion years earlier than thought. The work, described in the July 31 issue of Science, is a major step forward in understanding when and how Earth began to evolve into its modern form. An ancient magnetic field could have made the 500-million-year-old planet more hospitable to life, by preventing the Sun’s powerful solar wind from stripping away the atmosphere....

By Fiona Ortiz A 26-year-old woman who received the first transplanted uterus in the United States said on Monday she was looking forward to getting pregnant next year. “I was told at 16 I would never have children. From that moment on I prayed that God would allow me the opportunity to experience pregnancy,” said Lindsey, who did not give her last name to protect the privacy of her three adopted sons....

Since then, the behaviorists’ black box has been penetrated by neuroscientists, most recently by Read Montague of the Baylor College of Medicine with Why Choose This Book? (Dutton, 2006). Montague argues that our brains evolved computational programs to evaluate choices in terms of their value and efficiency: “Those that accurately estimate the costs and the long-term benefits of choices will be more efficient than those that don’t.” Life, like the economy, is about the allocation of limited resources that have alternative uses (to paraphrase economist Thomas Sowell)....

IT SEEMS OBVIOUS to me that I have free will. When I have just made a decision, say, to go to a concert, I feel that I could have chosen to do something else. Yet many philosophers say this instinct is wrong. According to their view, free will is a figment of our imagination. No one has it or ever will. Rather our choices are either determined—necessary outcomes of the events that have happened in the past—or they are random....

Billions of years ago, organic chemicals in the primordial soup somehow organized themselves into the first organisms. A few years ago scientists found that something similar happens every once in awhile in the cells of all living things: bits of once-quiet stretches of DNA sometimes spontaneously assemble themselves into genes. Such “de novo” genes may go on to play significant roles in the evolution of individual organisms—even humans. But how many are there?...

“If we wish to learn more about cancer, we must now concentrate on the cellular genome.” Nobel laureate Renato Dulbecco penned those words more than 20 years ago in one of the earliest public calls for what would become the Human Genome Project. “We are at a turning point,” Dulbecco, a pioneering cancer researcher, declared in 1986 in the journal Science. Discoveries in preceding years had made clear that much of the deranged behavior of cancer cells stemmed from damage to their genes and alterations in their functioning....

Carbon dioxide, or CO2 for short. It’s simple gas that makes up a small part of our planet’s atmosphere. And yet it’s at the root of one of the biggest problems of the 21st century (that would be climate change, for the record). NASA scientists have been keeping an eye on the movement of CO2 across land, air and sea in an effort to zero in on the changes in store for our planet....

Scientific American presents Math Dude by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. It’s that time of year when people gather together to stay up late, make toasts, profess their well-intentioned resolutions for the next dozen months, and welcome in the New Year. Of course, exactly when you and your friends celebrate the changing of the year is determined by precisely where you live....

In case you were wondering, there’s no evidence that Mars hosted an alien civilization thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., asked a panel of planetary scientists to speculate about this possibility today (July 18), during a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Science, Space and Technology’s Space Subcommittee. The inquiry followed testimony by panelist Ken Farley, the project scientist for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission, stating that the Red Planet had lakes and rivers, and perhaps even a huge northern ocean, until about 3....

Archaeologists working on the eastern coast of England have found a series of footprints that were made by human ancestors sometime between one million and 780,000 years ago. Pressed into estuary mudflats now hard with age, these prints are the oldest ones known outside of Africa, where humanity arose. Scientists discovered the prints in early May 2013, at a seaside site in Happisburgh. High seas had eroded the beach sand to reveal the mudflats underneath....

By Sharon WeinbergerBy highlighting the limits of traditional military technology, the drawn-out conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have spurred the U.S. defense department to shake up its $12-billion science and technology research program. The defense research and engineering office, headquartered at the Pentagon in Washington D.C., is overseeing a budget shift away from applied research that supports weapons and into areas such as biology, computer science and the social sciences. All of these have “a potential for being game-changers” on the battlefield, says Zachary Lemnios, the defense department’s chief technology officer and director of defense research and engineering....

U.S. solar power grew by 6.2 gigawatts in 2014, a 30 percent increase over the previous year and representing nearly $18 billion in new investment, according to data released this morning by the Solar Energy Industries Association and GTM Research. The new power systems, comprising tens of thousands of photovoltaic (PV) arrays for homes, schools, businesses and utilities, as well as a handful of large concentrated solar power facilities in places like the Mojave Desert, raised the United States’ profile as one of the world’s leading adopters of solar power, officials said....