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The FDA recently announced that it plans to increase its oversight of the multi-billion dollar supplement industry. This would include everything from the calcium and multivitamins at your local drug store, to those questionable weight loss and virility supplements pitched on late night cable TV stations. According to the FDA, “Three out of every four American consumers take a dietary supplement on a regular basis. For older Americans, the rate rises to four in five....

Hey, Mr. Dylan, “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is.”Cars with “zoom,” “roar” and “thrust” are so pass. Where Has All the Flower Power Gone I am a child of the ’60s. And like many of my generation we thought we were going to change the world. Alas, the Age of Aquarius has come and gone, and by many measures my cohorts and I will be leaving this mortal coil with the Earth in a good deal worse shape than we found it in....

It’s a classic girl-bonding scenario: While moaning to your roommate about uterine cramps, premenstrual syndrome or some other such periodic inconvenience you realize that she, unlucky girl, is having her period, too. Momentarily distracted, you take a collective step back to marvel at the wonders of human biology that have allowed your ovulation cycles to synchronize. Though widely accepted as a fact of female life, many psychologists and anthropologists doubt the existence of such menstrual synchrony....

When the going got tough, early humans went to the beach for seafood and possibly a dose of symbolic thought, according to a new study. Researchers excavating a cave on the southern coast of South Africa discovered a bowl’s worth of edible shellfish dating back to about 165,000 years ago, when Africa was colder and drier—pushing back the earliest known seafood meal by 40,000 years. The team found small stone blades and reddish rocks tossed in with the shells; the rocks were marked in a way that suggests they were ground into powder used to make paint, possibly to adorn the face or body to symbolize status or membership in a group....

The European Union on Monday prohibited the use of X-ray body scanners in European airports, parting ways with the U.S. Transportation Security Administration, which has deployed hundreds of the scanners as a way to screen millions of airline passengers for explosives hidden under clothing. The European Commission, which enforces common policies of the EU’s 27 member countries, adopted the rule “in order not to risk jeopardizing citizens’ health and safety.”...

The Obama administration gave conditional support today for a federal-industry partnership that would build an advanced coal-burning power plant in Illinois to trap and store carbon dioxide emissions, reversing a Bush-era decision to abandon the FutureGen project. The Energy Department plans to contribute slightly more than $1 billion to the project. The announcement follows pressure from Illinois lawmakers – including Dick Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat – who had savaged former Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman’s decision to abandon the plan early last year....

Vinod khosla has become the most widely recognized investor in clean technologies—those that generate or save energy with the least environmental impact. He founded Khosla Ventures in 2004 to fund new companies, after being a long-time partner at the giant investment firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. His entrepreneurial roots stretch back to 1982, when he co-founded Sun Microsystems, which became a $7-billion workstation and software company. In a one-on-one dialogue, conducted before an audience of energy entrepreneurs and financiers at the recent GoingGreen conference in San Francisco, Scientific American’s Mark Fischetti asked Khosla (an adviser to the magazine) to assess, with his venture capitalist’s eye, which new energy innovations are most likely to succeed and why....

It can taste, smell and sing. It can be a corkscrew, a crowbar or a hypodermic needle. It can stretch up to nine times your body length (if you’re a barnacle); be a detachable tentacle covered in suckers (if you’re an argonaut octopus); or even see, using light-sensing cells that guide it smoothly to its destination (if you’re a Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly). Or, it can be a limp, fleshy tube, hardly worth writing home about, if you’re a human....

Burning coal provides half the electricity in the U.S. and one third of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Capturing that carbon dioxide and storing it will be essential if climate change induced by such pollution is to be averted, according to reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dubbed carbon capture and storage (or carbon sequestration), such technology will be fully demonstrated for the first time near Mattoon in southeastern Illinois, the FutureGen Alliance (a public–private partnership to build a prototype clean-coal plant) announced....

Editor’s Note (02/08/18): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published August 5, 2016, in light of the 2018 Winter Games which begin on February 9, in PyeongChang, South Korea. Scientists have been searching for a genetic explanation for athletic ability for decades. So far their efforts have focused largely on genes related to physical attributes, such as muscular function and aerobic efficiency. But geneticists have also started to investigate the neurologicalbasis behind what makes someone excel in sports—and new findings implicate dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for the feelings of reward and pleasure....

Key concepts Chemistry Polymers Ratios Mixtures Introduction Have you ever wondered how fun toys like Silly Putty, Gak and Slime are made? It’s the properties of polymers, certain kinds of large molecules, that make these products bouncy, slimy, stretchy, breakable, hard, soft, sticky, moldable—and just plain fun to play with. Polymers are found in a variety of materials that have a broad range of properties. Materials made from polymers can be found in nature, such as amber and natural rubber, or generated synthetically, such as nylon, silicone and all plastics....

The age of industry is the age of steel. Steel provides the support for modern buildings, the bodies of modern cars and even the stylings of modern appliances. Iron is the primary constituent of steel, and records of its extraction and employment reach back more than 100 years. By combining this data with information on the metal’s return as scrap or waste, Daniel Mller of Yale University and his colleagues derived the first estimates of the total stock of iron in use and elsewhere in the U....

When Seth Pollak’s son was a year old, he and his wife, Jenny Saffran, took a trip to the Babies “R” Us store near their home in Madison, Wis. They wanted to buy a teething ring—nothing special, just a frozen band to numb the baby’s gums. Passing through the bears and bicycles, they found the correct display. They pulled a pricey package off the shelf, which read, “Promotes oral motor and language development....

Francisco J. Ayala pulls open the top drawer of a black cabinet and flips through nearly a dozen files, all neatly titled by publication and due date. These are the essays on evolution he has been churning out over the past six to eight weeks for popular books and magazines. “Hack jobs,” he calls them with a smile, bragging that each one takes only a day or two to complete. After some 30 years of proselytizing about evolution to Christian believers, the esteemed evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, has honed his arguments to a fine point....

Brian Greene, a theoretical physicist at Columbia University, is known for his popular books, which have exposed the complex ideas of string theory and quantum physics to a wide audience. With a new four-part NOVA miniseries, The Fabric of the Cosmos, which begins airing November 2 at 9:00 P.M. Eastern time on PBS, Greene ought to be able to reach even more curious folk. Right after part 1, Greene will host a live Q&A session with guests Leonard Susskind, the “bad boy” of phsyics, and Saul Perlmutter, a 2011 Nobel Prize winner....

President Biden wants the warmth of many suns to power American homes and businesses. The White House held a summit yesterday on fusion, which could someday become a major source of carbon-free energy. Fusion is made by pressing atoms together to create heavier ones. Nuclear fusion is the energy process that powers stars, with a low radiation and tremendous energy output. Critics have long claimed that fusion energy, scientifically possible but commercially challenging, is decades away from powering homes or businesses....

Glucose is the main carbohydrate product of photosynthesis and a primary source of energy in most living things. It is a sugar and the human body’s main source of fuel. And, because of its ubiquity, it is a leading candidate to replace oil as an abundant source for fuels, plastics and other petroleum products. Unfortunately, converting the stuff into useable forms remains a difficult process. For example, using acid catalysts to transform it into a basic building block for plastics also yields a vat of impurities (such as levulinic and formic acids)....

Today, 99 percent of our transoceanic data traffic—including phone calls, text and e-mail messages, Web sites, digital images and video, and even some television—travels across the oceans via undersea cables. These cable systems, as opposed to satellites, carry most of the intercontinental Internet traffic. In her new book, The Undersea Network, New York University assistant professor of media, culture and communication Nicole Starosielski tracks submarine systems as they thread together small islands and major urban hubs, conflicts at coastal landing points, and Cold-War–era cable stations....

JANUARY 1962 Nuclear Genie “As the nuclear powers resumed their deadlock at the Geneva test-ban conference, most of the nations of the world were maneuvering to keep themselves clear of the atomic incubus. Acting through the United Nations, these countries passed a quick succession of anti-atom resolutions. First, the General Assembly voted 71 to 20 to request all powers to stop nuclear testing immediately and permanently. Voting against the measure were the nuclear powers—the U....

In 1998 two teams of researchers made a milestone cosmological announcement: The universe, long known to be expanding, was not slowing down in its expansion as expected but was in fact accelerating. Both groups had been studying exploding stars, or supernovae, and used the objects’ movement to show that the universe is speeding up. The culprit was labeled dark energy—a hypothesized presence that pervades space and pushes the pieces of the universe apart....