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Today’s car guts are pretty smart, with dozens of computers that monitor and adjust mechanical and electrical systems on the fly. Headlights, however, are still pretty dumb. Their light sources have evolved from acetylene and oil lamps to tungsten filaments to LEDs in the past century but—outside of advanced headlights available in a handful of luxury vehicles—they simply light whatever is in front of them. That limitation sometimes causes problems, as indiscriminant illumination reflects light off of snow and rain during storms and creates glare for oncoming drivers, even in dry weather....

Tucked away in the rolling hills of northern Michigan a once-dilapidated warehouse in the town of Copemish now brims with thousands of tiny saplings. But these trees are not as young as their sizes would suggest. A nonprofit, Archangel Ancient Tree Archive, has cloned from tissue samples of some of the world’s oldest and largest trees found across the U.S. and beyond—some more than two millennia old. “Most coast redwoods and other trees don’t live to be a thousand years old, but some live to be 2,000 or more and we don’t know why,” says David Milarch, lifelong nurseryman who co-founded the Champion Tree Project in 1994, which became Archangel 14 years later....

Bill Gates recounts the history of how Ctrl Alt Del came to be. (Credit: Harvard/Screenshot by CNET) Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has admitted what quite a few Windows users have been thinking for a long time: control-alt-delete is an unnecessary mechanism. Give us a single button, Gates said. But it wasn’t to be. (Credit: Harvard/Screenshot by CNET) Speaking in a broad interview at Harvard over the weekend, Gates said that the control-alt-delete function, which allows users to log in to Windows and access the task manager (you may be most familiar with it as the first step in rebooting), was conceived after an IBM keyboard designer wouldn’t give him a single button to perform the same chore....

By Nacho Doce and Pablo Garcia SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Scientists struggling to unravel the mysteries of a Zika epidemic in Brazil hope they can learn from cases of women giving birth to twins in which only one child is afflicted by the microcephaly birth defect associated with the virus. Jaqueline Jessica Silva de Oliveira hoped doctors were wrong when a routine ultrasound showed that one of her unborn twins would be born with the condition, marked by stunted head size and developmental issues....

Can we control our thoughts? Why do thoughts pop into my head as I’m trying to fall asleep? —Esther Robison, New York City Barry Gordon, professor of neurology and cognitive science at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, replies: We are aware of a tiny fraction of the thinking that goes on in our minds, and we can control only a tiny part of our conscious thoughts. The vast majority of our thinking efforts goes on subconsciously....

Three debates down and one to go, and climate change has still not been addressed by the presidential candidates and their running mates in face-to-face confrontations. The punchy debate last night between President Obama and Mitt Romney opened with testy exchanges on energy in which the president accused his opponent of ignoring renewable power. Romney, in turn, attacked Obama for presiding over rising gasoline prices and faking support for fossil fuels....

In a symposium at the Society for Neuroscience in Atlanta on October 18, University of Milan researcher Maria Abbracchio announced that she had managed to prevent almost all damage from stroke in lab rats by blocking the action of an obscure gatekeeper in cell walls. The finding reveals important dynamics about stroke mechanisms and could eventually lead to drugs that prevent brain damage from occurring after a stroke. Given that treatment at present can only try to compensate for post-stroke damage rather than repair it, “this is real news,” says Douglas Fields, a National Institute of Health researcher who chaired the symposium....

Large populations of deer are edging out forest birds in North America, report scientists in this month’s issue of the journal Biological Conservation. The study is the first to evaluate the impact deer grazing can have on nest quality and food resources in areas unaffected by human activities such as forestry or hunting. It also offers general rules for predicting the influence these animals could have on bird ecosystems in the future....

The earth is retaining more of the sun’s energy than it is sending back into space, scientists say. That is the conclusion from a new simulation that takes into account such climate forcing variables as greenhouse gas and aerosol concentrations, land use and surface reflectivity, and that calculates global temperatures and other climate values for the atmosphere and the oceans. And a decade of measurements of the heat content of the oceans confirm the model’s findings, its creators report in a paper published online Thursday by the journal Science....

The bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean midway between Bermuda and the Canary Islands must rank highly on any list of unlikely places to find a bustling city. Yet there, in the darkness that reigns nearly a kilometer below the sunlit surface, nature has built an undersea metropolis, a complex of limestone towers as tall as skyscrapers that is home to masses of snails, crabs and mussels. The towers form as minerals precipitate out of warm, alkaline water jetting from hydrothermal vents along the ocean floor....

It is 11:30 on an August morning in New York City’s Central Park Zoo—breakfast time for the sea lions. A joyful crowd oohs and aahs as trainers put the animals through their paces: catching tossed fish in midair, high-fiving with their flippers, squirting water and torpedoing around the pool. Amid the raucous throng, nine small children watch in wide-eyed silence. When a sea lion zips past at stunning speed, they do not add their voices to the squeals of delight....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As of May 2022, the U.S. is experiencing another uptick in the number of COVID-19 cases. High rates of infection in Europe and Asia, along with the continued emergence of new sub-variants, such as omicron BA.4 and BA.5, raise concerns that another surge could be on the way. Even though demand for COVID-19 tests greatly overwhelmed supply earlier in the pandemic, rapid home tests are more available today....

The way doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s disease may be starting to change. Traditionally clinicians have relied on tests of memory and reasoning skills and reports of social withdrawal to identify patients with Alzheimer’s. Such assessments can, in expert hands, be fairly conclusive—but they are not infallible. Around one in five people who are told they have the neurodegenerative disorder actually have other forms of dementia or, sometimes, another problem altogether, such as depression....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. I’m sure just about everyone knows that you can’t drop electronics in water. But not many people know why, or what to do when this inevitably happens. What’s an Ion? Actually, it isn’t the water that breaks electronics; it’s the small particles that are dissolved in water called ions. These particles cause electricity to go places it’s not supposed to go – this is called a “short” and it’s what ultimately causes your device to break....

The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval yesterday of the first new drug for Alzheimer’s disease in 18 years was welcomed by some patients looking for hope against an intractable condition. But for many researchers it came as a surprise — and a disappointment. Aducanumab — developed by biotechnology company Biogen in Cambridge, Massachusetts — is the first drug approved that attempts to treat a possible cause of the neurodegenerative disease, rather than just the symptoms....

Sharks are usually thought of as primitive creatures, sometimes called “living fossils.” But a new study of a 325-million-year-old shark fossil — the most complete of its kind — suggests modern sharks have evolved significantly from their bony ancestors. The ancient fossil has characteristics of both bony fishes and modern sharks. But its gill structures more closely resemble those of bony fishes, challenging the notion that modern sharks have remained unchanged over evolutionary time....

The flop of the 2004 animated film The Polar Express is largely blamed on the “creepy” feeling people get when they look at very realistic-looking robots or human animations. These too real facsimiles fall into the so-called uncanny valley, between acceptably fake-looking human representations and real, healthy humans. Psychologists have long wondered whether this aversion has an evolutionary basis, and new research on macaques suggests that it does. Princeton University researchers presented images of real monkey faces, unrealistic animated faces and realistic animated faces to five monkey subjects and recorded how long they gazed at each....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - New Mexico on Friday withdrew a temporary permit allowing two new disposal vaults at a U.S. government nuclear waste dump grappling with a release of radiation in February, state regulators said. Seventeen workers at the Carlsbad-area “waste isolation pilot project” (WIPP) were exposed to radiation after an accidental leak last month from the site which stores waste from U.S. nuclear labs and weapons production facilities. State regulators were withdrawing the draft expansion permit to identify safety issues that may need to be addressed in the aftermath of that accident, New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn told a news conference on Friday afternoon....

U.S. and China called out on global warming United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the U.S. and China to play ‘‘a more constructive role’’ in combating climate change, punctuating release of this year’s fourth and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The latest report blends key points of the group’s earlier reviews of climate trends, the possibility of adapting to a warmer climate and strategies for cutting carbon emissions....

The world’s largest scientific project is threatened with further delays, as agencies struggle to complete the design and sign contracts worth hundred of millions of euros with industrial partners, Nature has learned. ITER is a massive project designed to show the feasibility of nuclear fusion as a power source. The device consists of a doughnut-shaped reactor called a tokamak, wrapped in superconducting magnets that squeeze and heat a plasma of hydrogen isotopes to the point of fusion....