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Everyone loves unsolved mysteries. Examples include Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific in 1937 and the daring escape of inmates Frank Morris and John and Clarence Anglin from Alcatraz Island in California in 1962. Moreover our interest holds even if the mystery is based on a joke. Take author Douglas Adams’s popular 1979 science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first in a series of five. Toward the end of the book, the supercomputer Deep Thought reveals that the answer to the “Great Question” of “Life, the Universe and Everything” is “forty-two....

Naomi Oreskes is a science historian, professor at the University of California, San Diego, and co-author (with Erik Conway) of “Merchants of Doubt,” a book that examined how a handful of scientists obscure the facts on a range of issues, including tobacco use and climate change. Her seminal paper in the journal Science, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” challenged – back in 2004 – the notion that climate change science was uncertain....

The world population currently stands at about 7 billion people, and the United Nations expects that to grow to 9 or 10 billion by the end of the century. But populations generally don’t stay at the same level for long periods of time–they tend to cycle up and down, and sometimes, if they’ve grown in ways that are unsustainable, they crash. How do we avoid this fate and keep the world on a sustainable path?...

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Say you’re browsing the web for a new coffeemaker, when suddenly an ad pops up for your favorite shampoo, or that great book you recently read, or that couch you’re sitting on. Just kidding on that last one. Well, kind of… Almost all large websites track your web browsing activity....

It can save a life, figure out someone’s predisposition to developing cancer, solve a crime from a long time ago or find long-lost relatives: genome sequencing has come a long way since the human genome was first sequenced in the early 2000s. Fast-forward to today, and this process of determining someone’s complete genetic code is becoming ever more routine. Thousands of COVID-19 survivors, for instance, are now getting their genome mapped, in a bid to help researchers understand how specific genetic makeup could affect a person’s susceptibility to the coronavirus....

“It’s a wide-open marketplace,” Tom Mauser, a gun-control advocate in Colorado whose son was killed in the 1999 Columbine shootings, told reporters. “The Internet has really changed things. You don’t have to show your face. It’s anything goes.” But is it? That depends in part on whether you buy from a store or an individual. By federal law, when buying from a licensed dealer — in-state or out-of-state, in-person or online — you are subject to a background check....

You’ve seen the game of pachinko—a small metal ball dropped into a thicket of horizontal pegs rattles its way to the bottom. What if the pachinko ball suddenly stopped halfway down, without any force holding it in place? That’s essentially what researchers have now done using wavy quantum particles instead of metal balls and specially prepared light instead of a pachinko board. Researchers are pros at using laser beams to forcefully stop atoms in their tracks....

Deep in a bacterium’s gelatinous matrix dwell little “cellular machines” called retrons, which produce single strands of DNA to detect certain viral infections. Now for the first time, researchers have used these natural DNA scriptwriters to modify genes in human cells. A new study, published in Nature Chemical Biology, suggests this technique can enhance gene editing across diverse animal groups. Although the well-known CRISPR process has made gene editing much easier in recent years, it “has its own limitations,” says the study’s senior author Seth Shipman, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Francisco....

Scientists are worried about the effects of long-term warming on human health and infectious disease, but a new study finds a link between epidemics and a cold climate. By analyzing Chinese records throughout nearly 2,000 years of history—from between A.D. 1 and 1911—researchers have found that climate-driven disturbances like floods, droughts and locust outbreaks were associated with disease epidemics. The findings, published yesterday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, particularly suggest that climate-related agricultural failures may have led to famines and declines in human health and nutrition, which made communities more susceptible to infection....

By Mary Wisniewski and Eric M. Johnson(Reuters) - - President Barack Obama issued an emergency declaration for the state of West Virginia on Friday, ordering federal aid in the aftermath of a chemical spill that has left up to 300,000 people without tap water, closed schools and businesses.The spill of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol, a chemical used in the coal industry, occurred Thursday on the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia’s capital and largest city, upriver from the eastern U....

Between December 7, 1982, and February 16, 2016, the state of Texas executed 534 inmates, 417 of whom issued a last statement. This January in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, psychologists Sarah Hirschmüller and Boris Egloff, both at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, published the results of their evaluation of most of the statements, which they put through a computerized text-analysis program called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. The biggest finding was a statistically significant difference between the average percentage of positive emotion words (9....

“Is Matthew there?” asked Cheyenne, directing her voice toward the box on the table in hopes that her brother would come through from the other side. “Yes,” the reply came. With the connection “validated,” Cheyenne shakily continued: “Was the suicide a mistake?” The speaker crackled, “My death was a mistake.” With tears cascading down her cheeks, Cheyenne asked to speak with her mother, and when the connection was made she sputtered out, “Do you see my children, your beautiful grandchildren?...

Editor’s Note: The following is the introduction to the March 2015 issue of Scientific American Classics: Intoxicating: The Science of Alcohol Alcohol has long perplexed our species. Wherever we look in the ancient or modern world, people have shown remarkable ingenuity in discovering how to make fermented and distilled beverages and in incorporating them into their cultures. Africa, where Homo sapiens first emerged some 200,000 years ago, sets the pattern, which is repeated over and over again as humans spread out across the globe....

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Scientists have discovered a new strain of avian flu in the Antarctic, after testing a group of Adélie penguins, according to an Australian-based researcher. “We found that this virus was unlike anything else detected in the world,” Aeron Hurt of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Reference and Research on Influenza told Reuters from Melbourne on Tuesday. The flu virus, H11N2, was found in a small number of members of a group of Adélie penguins tested at two locations on the Antarctic Peninsula, the continent’s northernmost region....

Want a son? Pack on the calories. Biologist Fiona Mathews of the University of Exeter in England and her colleagues surveyed 740 first-time mothers on their pre-pregnancy eating habits and found that 56 percent of those on high-calorie diets had sons, compared with 45 percent of those on leaner menus. But it wasn’t only calories that contributed; specific foods also appear to play a role, say researchers. “Prior to pregnancy, breakfast cereal, but no other item, was strongly associated with infant sex,” the researchers write in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B....

Climate change will pose major new hurdles for U.S. naval forces, forcing the military to grapple with an emerging Arctic frontier, increasing demand for humanitarian aid and creating rising seas that could threaten low-lying bases, the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday. “Even the most moderate current trends in climate, if continued, will present new national security challenges for the the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard,” concludes a new academy report....

Some of the brightest objects in the Universe—quasars—are vanishing rapidly. Astronomers now think that they understand this mysterious behaviour, and the answer could help them to explain how galaxies such as the Milky Way evolve. Quasars are supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies fed by huge quantities of gas that shine across the visible Universe. Astronomers have long thought that quasars persist for millions of years before dimming slowly over tens of thousands of years....

Richard Wrangham has tasted chimp food, and he doesn’t like it. “The typical fruit is very unpleasant,” the Harvard University biological anthropologist says of the hard, strangely shaped fruits endemic to the chimp diet, some of which look like cherries, others like cocktail sausages. “Fibrous, quite bitter. Not a tremendous amount of sugar. Some make your stomach heave.” After a few tastings in western Uganda, where he works part of the year on his 20-year-old project studying wild chimpanzees, Wrangham came to the conclusion that no human could survive long on such a diet....

FAST FACTS PROTON VELOCITY: 99.9999991% of light speed PROTONS PER BUNCH: up to 100 billion NUMBER OF BUNCHES: up to 2,808 BUNCH CROSSINGS PER SECOND: up to 31 million, at 4 locations COLLISIONS PER BUNCH CROSSING: up to 20 DATA PER COLLISION: about 1.5 megabytes NUMBER OF HIGGS PARTICLES: 1 every 2.5 seconds (at full beam luminosity and under certain assumptions about the Higgs) CURIOSITIES TILT! The LHC’s tunnel is tilted 1....

It takes more mutations to trigger autism in women than in men, which may explain why men are four times more likely to have the disorder, according to a study published 26 February in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The study found that women with autism or developmental delay tend to have more large disruptions in their genomes than do men with the disorder. Inherited mutations are also more likely to be passed down from unaffected mothers than from fathers....