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Few of Albert Einstein’s sayings have been as widely quoted as his remark that God does not play dice with the universe. People have naturally taken his quip as proof that he was dogmatically opposed to quantum mechanics, which views randomness as a built-in feature of the physical world. When a radioactive nucleus decays, it does so spontaneously; no rule will tell you when or why. When a particle of light strikes a half-silvered mirror, it either reflects off it or passes through; the outcome is open until the moment it occurs....

Back in 2010 Matt Thompson, then with National Public Radio, forecast in an op-ed that “at some point in the near future, automatic speech transcription will become fast, free, and decent.” He called that moment the “Speakularity,” in a sly reference to inventor Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the “singularity,” in which our minds will be uploaded into computers. And Thompson predicted that access to reliable automatic speech-recognition (ASR) software would transform the work of journalists—to say nothing of lawyers, marketers, people with hearing disabilities, and everyone else who deals in both spoken and written language....

October 1967 Shantytowns: Unseen Structure and Evolution “The common view is that the squatters populating the Peruvian shantytowns are Indians from the rural mountains who still speak only the Quechuan language, that they are uneducated, unambitious, disorganized, an economic drag on the nation—and also that they are a highly organized group of radicals who mean to take over and communize Peru’s cities. I found that in reality the people of the barriadas around Lima do not fit this description at all....

PROFILE NAMES Greg Ridgeway TITLE Acting director, National Institute of Justice (research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice) LOCATION Washington, D.C. You became acting director in January. What specific problems are you focused on addressing through the National Institute of Justice? Forensic science is going through a revolution, with opportunities as well as a lot of challenges. Many forensic labs have big backlogs—the most problematic, or the most disturbing, are the sexual assault kits....

What is the significance of the BICEP2 announcement? Scientists will be unravelling the consequences of this discovery for years. But some major implications are already clear: Albert Einstein predicted ‘gravitational waves’ nearly 100 years ago, but he also calculated that they would be extremely feeble, so much so that he thought they would never be detected. BICEP2’s findings are the most convincing evidence — short of direct detection — that gravitational waves actually exist....

In the November issue of Scientific American, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen of the University of Cambridge explores the possibility that some of the genes that contribute to autism are inherited along with genes behind certain cognitive talents common to scientists, engineers, mathematicians and other technical-minded people. Some evidence suggests that regions around the world where a lot of engineers and scientists live and marry—such as Silicon Valley in California and Eindhoven in the Netherlands—have higher than usual rates of autism....

The sky is always changing. The planets move overhead as they trace their paths around the sun, and the moon rotates through the heavens as it circles our own world. Though the stars that provide their backdrop stay fixed in relation to one another, they too spin above as Earth makes its daily revolution and its yearly passage around the sun. To appreciate this ever-changing view, grab these sky maps, go outside at night, and look up!...

A key idea behind network coding—that sending evidence about a message can be more useful at times than sending the message itself—originated with Claude Elwood Shannon in the late 1940s. At the time, Shannon worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories and was concerned about improving communications along copper telephone lines. Communication is about reliably transferring information from one location to another. In Shannon’s day, as today, achieving reliability was difficult because communications media were noisy....

The struggle to build what might become the next big thing in renewable energy started in a Colorado garage. The designers had gathered about $100 worth of rubber, tubing and valves for a wave energy experiment. They used the materials to build a small, inflatable pump in 2017. Then they tied it to the bottom of a shallow body of water so it would bob underneath the surface. The pressure from waves moving above it would momentarily push in the pump’s flexible diaphragm....

The biggest earthquake ever recorded in Oklahoma struck on November 5, a magnitude 5.6 temblor that buckled a highway and ruptured water pipes. This quake is part of a skyrocketing rise in seismic activity the state has seen in the past three years, leading many to wonder—and worry—about its cause. Might the practice of fracking, a controversial method of fracturing rock to help get at fossil fuels, be to blame?*...

Key concepts Physical Science Molecules Emulsion Colloid Introduction Whoever told you oil and water don’t mix might not have considered the term “emulsion.” It is possible for tiny particles of two seemingly unmixable substances to suspend in one another—like oil and water! This super scientific experiment demonstrates the magic of the invisible globule while bringing a yummy result to the table. Background Milk is mostly water with about 5 to 10 percent protein and fat globules....

Two teams of scientists simultaneously announce the discovery of a lifetime—a breakthrough that profoundly alters our view of the universe. A Nobel Prize is surely not far away. Yet the statutes of the Nobel Foundation state that the honor may not be “divided into more than three prizes at most.” A committee in Sweden now faces a knotty choice: Who among the teams’ many worthy scientists deserves to win the world’s most prestigious medal?...

More than half of the world’s expected nine billion people will live in giant urban expanses by 2030 as cities and their hinterlands occupy an additional 1.2 million square kilometers, thereby tripling in size. That’s an additional 1.35 billion people living in cities, suggesting that urban areas that currently occupy roughly 3 percent of the planet’s surface will continue to expand. By comparison, urban areas increased by just 58,000 square kilometers between 1970 and 2000....

If a theme emerged from the July issue, it was the technology that enhances our observational abilities. In “The Quest for the Superlens,” John B. Pendry and David R. Smith wrote about building a lens that could overcome the resolution limits of the illuminating light wavelengths. “Hubble’s Top 10,” by Mario Livio, reviewed the greatest discoveries made with the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope. In “CSI: The Reality,” Max M. Houck looked at how the portrayal of criminal investigation tools and methodologies on television forensics dramas might be making viewers unreasonable jurors in real-life courtrooms....

In the race to head off the most dangerous impacts of climate change, a solution to the methane emissions problem is lagging. Although carbon dioxide is a major source of air pollution from power plants that burn coal or natural gas, methane—the main component of natural gas—is a more potent climate change contributor over the short term than CO2. A halt to the release of raw methane from oil and gas operations is critical to combating global warming....

The statistics of who kills and how they do it often get lost in the arguments over gun control. In the U.S., where guns are plentiful, men commit more than 90 percent of killings. Their weapon of choice is overwhelmingly a gun. Men kill significant others, individuals they know and strangers more often with guns than any other weapon (left). Women also more frequently use guns to kill strangers. Perhaps counterintuitively, women are more likely to kill a significant other or family member using a blunt object, knife, poison or other method....

BEIJING (Reuters) - Protesters in eastern China clashed with police at a rally against plans to build a huge waste incinerator that residents fear will be harmful to their health and add to pollution. Choking smog blankets many Chinese cities and the environmental degradation resulting from the country’s breakneck economic growth is angering its increasingly well-educated and affluent population. Two of the protesters told Reuters that the demonstrations, which have lasted for more than two weeks, turned violent with hundreds of police descending onto the streets of Yuhang, close to the tourist city of Hangzhou....

ANCIENT HUMAN CONTACT “Journey into the Americas,” by Jennifer Raff, describes how DNA evidence has revealed a more complex picture of the peopling of the American continents. I have always wondered whether the Polynesians who got as far east as Easter Island could have reached South America. Could the anomalous archaeological sites in southern Chile that Raff describes have been the work of people who originated from the west rather than the north?...

Zoom: How Everything Moves, from Atoms and Galaxies to Blizzards and Bees by Bob Berman Little, Brown, 2014 (($27)) Science writer Berman invites readers to consider movement in all its mundane and fascinating forms: the temperature state of absolute zero, wherein atoms nearly stop moving; water circling down a toilet drain; hurricane-force winds; the mind-boggling speed of our universe’s expansion; and more. Part scientific and historical exploration, part travelogue, Berman’s story re-minds us of this inescapable law of nature: “Nothing in the universe is stationary,” he writes....

By Alister Doyle and Michael SzaboOSLO (Reuters) - The European Union and the United States opposed on Friday a call by developing countries to measure each nation’s historical responsibility for global warming to guide a U.N. deal in 2015 to cut future greenhouse gases.Rich nations fear that any scientific study that might blame rich nations most since they have burnt fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution could further delay sluggish U....