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In the film noir classic Double Indemnity, insurance agents are presented as cold-blooded in their pursuit of the facts. But it wasn’t until I saw a recent advertisement for Allstate, the insurance company, that I realized how seriously insurance agents take neuroscience. Allstate was advising parents to vote for graduated driver-licensing laws because teenagers’ “dorsal lateral prefrontal cortexes” are immature. There’s a reason, as this ad implies, that there are age brackets for auto insurance premiums....

By Sui-Lee Wee BEIJING (Reuters) - A man in a smog-ridden northern city has become the first person in China to sue the government for failing to curb air pollution, a state-run newspaper reported on Tuesday. China’s north is suffering a pollution crisis, with the capital Beijing itself shrouded in acrid smog. Authorities have introduced anti-pollution policies and often pledged to clean up the environment but the problem has not eased....

Scientists working to quell the COVID-19 pandemic have developed tests that detect antibodies in the blood of people who have previously been infected with the new coronavirus. These serology tests can provide important data on how COVID-19 is spreading through a population. There is also hope that the presence of certain antibodies may signify immunity to future infection—a possibility scientists are still investigating. Antibody tests do have potential shortcomings: they may detect ineffective antibodies, they do not indicate if an infection is still active, and they fail to detect infection if administered before antibodies develop....

More than 153 million people around the world with poor or no eyesight either don’t have access to or can’t afford vision correction, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Ninety percent live in low- or middle-income countries, WHO reports, where optometrists are harder to come by and individually crafted lenses cost too much for many. A British physicist wants to solve that problem. He has his sights set on the lofty goal of distributing one billion pairs of glasses, at $1 a pair, by 2020....

Dredging of a highly contaminated canal along the shore of Lake Michigan has begun, triggering fears among some experts that the project could release harmful chemicals into an Indiana community. To dig a deeper canal for ships, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is removing large volumes of contaminated sediment – equivalent to about 160 million truckloads – from the Indiana Harbor and Canal. The canal already contributes a significant amount of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) to East Chicago’s air....

Since 2008, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and a handful of other states have experienced unprecedented surges of earthquakes. Oklahoma’s rate increased from one or two per year to more than 800. Texas has seen a sixfold spike. Most have been small, but Oklahoma has seen several damaging quakes stronger than magnitude 5. While most scientists agree that the surge has been triggered by the injection of wastewater from oil and gas production into deep wells, some have suggested these quakes are natural, arising from faults in the crust that move on their own every so often....

Opioids have been blamed for the deaths of at least 400,000 U.S. residents in the past two decades—but research now shows that number could be much higher. Researchers looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on about 630,000 people who died of drug overdoses between 1999 and 2016. They separated the deaths into two categories: those with and without a specific drug indicated. For the first category, they analyzed how contributing causes of death (such as injuries and heart problems) and personal characteristics (such as age and gender) correlated with opioid involvement....

Gossip can act as a useful social shortcut—it lets you know whom to avoid without your having to learn a person’s faults the hard way. And gossip may also influence whether you notice someone in the first place, according to a study published in Science on June 17. To test whether gossip affects visual awareness, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University and her collaborators took advantage of a phenomenon called binocular rivalry....

Atypical farm burns vast quantities of fossil fuels to plow fields, sow seeds, reap harvests and truck products many miles to population centers. It spreads heaps of petroleum-based fertilizers, which then run off into streams and watersheds. It also consumes rivers of freshwater and casts pesticides across the countryside. Raising chickens and pigs further insults the earth with unhygienic filth. Why not grow grains, vegetables and fruits right where the expanding crowds of consumers are: in the middle of a city, inside a tall glass building?...

Extreme close-up images of human bone have revealed one of the secrets of its strength, researchers report. A better understanding of its material properties could lead to improved therapies for bone fractures, or help avoid them altogether. Previous studies had demonstrated that the mechanical properties of bone arise from its protein fibers, known as collagen fibrils, which were thought to be coated in a very thin film of mineral crystals. Using atomic force microscopy, Georg E....

Privacy is a public Rorschach test: say the word aloud, and you can start any number of passionate discussions. One person worries about governmental abuse of power; another blushes about his drug use and sexual history; a third vents outrage about how corporations collect private data to target their ads or how insurance companies dig through personal medical records to deny coverage to certain people. Some fear a world of pervasive commercialization, in which data are used to sort everyone into one or another “market segment”—the better to cater to people’s deepest desires or to exploit their most frivolous whims....

To say Apple is under pressure to deliver something great at its Sept. 7 event for the iPhone 7 would be the understatement of the year. There are millions of iPhone 5 and iPhone 6 owners who want something worth upgrading to, and despite an embarrassing worldwide recall of the Galaxy Note 7, Apple finds itself playing catch-up with Samsung when it comes to design and camera quality. With phone sales accounting for nearly two-thirds of the company’s revenue, Apple can’t afford for the iPhone to be a letdown....

By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazineThe distribution of fallout from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has now been mapped by two independent teams. The charts reduce the uncertainty surrounding the amount of contamination across Japan, and help to show which areas should be safe to return to farming.The accident at Fukushima occurred after a magnitude-9 earthquake and subsequent tsunami hit northeastern Japan on March 11. The disasters knocked out the plant’s cooling system, causing several reactors to melt down and huge amounts of radioactive material to be emitted....

“The line between entertaining math and serious math is a blurry one,” Martin Gardner wrote in the August 1998 issue of Scientific American. Gardner, who died in 2010, was this magazine’s Mathematical Games columnist for a quarter of a century, until he retired in 1981. His fans have worked hard to maintain that blurriness, most recently in March at the 11th Gathering 4 Gardner, the biennial reunion dedicated to celebrating the polymath’s contributions to mathematics and its relation to art, music, architecture and, well, fun....

A newfound exoplanet may be one of the best bets to host alien life ever discovered—and it’s right in Earth’s backyard, cosmically speaking. Astronomers have spotted a roughly Earth-mass world circling the small, dim star Ross 128, which lies just 11 light-years from the sun. The planet, known as Ross 128b, may have surface temperatures amenable to life as we know it, the researchers announced in a new study that will appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics....

While scuba diving around the Aleutian Islands in 2014, marine ecologist Doug Rasher saw little sign of the curtains of lush green kelp forests he would have had to push through decades earlier. “It feels like a ghost town,” says Rasher, a researcher at the nonprofit Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences. The eeriness did not end there: during a boat ride, one of Rasher’s colleagues pointed to a cove where he had seen hundreds of sea otters splashing in the frigid water in the 1970s....

A LEGEND DEPARTS I was taken aback by Mariette DiChristina’s announcement in “Science Communication 101” [From the Editor] that she was stepping down as editor in chief and moving on to a position at Boston University. I have been a consistent reader of Scientific American since 1963. About 10 years ago I began to notice a positive difference in the magazine: coverage of both science and world events! Finally, you were encouraging scientists to take their rightful place in the world, with coverage of topics such as women’s health and the reality of industrially caused global warming....

As policymakers and scientists try to find the best way to pump emissions from coal-fired power plants into deep underground reservoirs, another carbon dioxide sink is already soaking up greenhouse gases and has the potential to soak up much more. Temperate forests in eastern North America are storing only part of their historic carbon sequestration potential, according to ecologists at McGill University and the University of Wisconsin. “There’s quite a lot of potential for the future,” said Jeanine Rhemtulla, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill and lead author of a study published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Jol Coutu knelt on the cold cement floor of the pet supply store he managed in Montreal, his wrists bound behind him with telephone wire. He could feel the barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of his neck. “You’re lying!” the gunman screamed. “And I am going to blow your head off.” He and another attacker had herded Coutu and a young cashier into the back room and demanded that he unlock the safe....

Researchers believe they may have unlocked the mystery behind a set of blood disorders called myeloproliferative syndromes—precursors to conditions such as leukemia that are triggered by an excess of stem cells. If so, the finding could set the stage for ways to prevent and treat such conditions—some of which can lead to heart disease, abnormal bleeding and even death. Scientists long believed that these diseases were caused by disruptions in the normal cycle of blood stem cells that prompted them to morph into progenitor cells, an intermediate phase when stem cells have been programmed to become a certain type of tissue cell, but have not fully matured into that form....