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Imagine snapping a panoramic picture from the top of the Empire State Building, then zooming in on a speck to reveal a quarter lying on the sidewalk. That’s the promise of single-shot gigapixel cameras—cameras that shoot images composed of at least one billion pixels, or picture elements. Apart from their obvious appeal to photographers, gigapixel images also hold tremendous potential for law enforcement and the military. Such high resolution would enable unmanned aerial vehicles to capture detail down to a license plate number while flying at altitudes too high to be spotted from the ground....

Terrell Carter remembers one prisoner in particular. They had both been seeking commutations of their life sentence so they could eventually apply for parole. But Carter says that in the midst of the process, his fellow inmate became so debilitated with dementia that the man could no longer function well enough to complete the paperwork. Within a few months, Carter says, this prisoner was incapacitated, lying in bed with arms outstretched over his head, calling for help....

For his 158th birthday, Nikola Tesla got a day named in his honor and a new science museum with $1 million in funding from billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk, the CEO of electric car company Tesla Motors and rocket company SpaceX, pledged the money in support of a new Tesla museum to be built on the grounds of the Serbian-American inventor’s laboratory at Wardenclyffe in Long Island, New York. The announcement was made July 10 at a birthday celebration on the historic site....

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in equal parts to Alain Aspect of the University of Paris-Saclay, John F. Clauser of J. F. Clauser & Associates, and Anton Zeilinger of the University of Vienna, for their pathfinding work in quantum mechanics and quantum information science. Working independently, each of the three researchers forged new experiments demonstrating and investigating quantum entanglement, the curious phenomenon in which two or more particles exist in a so-called entangled state....

By Stephen Strauss of Nature magazineThe hope that swarms of gamers can help to solve difficult biological problems has been given another boost by a report in the journal PLoS One, showing that data gleaned from the online game Phylo are helping to untangle a major problem in comparative genomics.The game was created to address the ‘multiple sequence alignment (MSA) problem’, which refers to the difficulty of aligning roughly similar sequences of DNA in genes common to many species....

Cady Coleman is the real-life Sandra Bullock—sort of. Coleman is a NASA astronaut, like Bullock’s character, Ryan Stone, in the new film Gravity, out October 4. As Bullock prepared for the role, she spoke with Coleman about the unique challenges and dangers astronauts face, and Coleman described her daily life in orbit as a member of the crew living on the International Space Station. Gravity illustrates a lot of what can go wrong in space....

This summer a professional trapper caught an alligator in a lagoon in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, following a weeklong search that drew crowds of onlookers and captured national headlines. Dubbed “Chance the Snapper,” after a local hip-hop artist, the five-foot, three-inch reptile had likely been let loose by an unprepared pet owner, say experts at the Chicago Herpetological Society (CHS). This was no anomaly: pet gators have recently turned up in a backyard pool on Long Island, at a grocery store parking lot in suburban Pittsburgh (the fourth in that area since May) and again in Chicago....

Newborn babies can recognize the sound of their mother’s voice at birth. But scientists are unsure which aspects of language are built into our brain through genetics and which are learned by listening in the womb. To investigate this question, a group of researchers in France studied 12 preterm infants, who were born two to three months’ premature. At this stage brain connections are just beginning to form, meaning the infants’ brain activity reflects the brain’s initial organization rather than connections strengthened by learning, according to the researchers....

Venezuelan officials announced this week that they would investigate whether enemies could have deliberately infected late President Hugo Chávez with cancer. Chávez died on March 5, apparently of a heart attack, after battling cancer for two years. When the former Venezuelan president was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer in 2011, he speculated that his enemies could have given him the disease. He also implied that U.S. agents could have developed a technology to induce cancer, according to a CNN news story at the time....

By Katharine SandersonA US$2.5-million stimulus grant has been awarded to the American Society for Cell Biology in Bethesda, Maryland, to establish an online open-access database called ‘The Cell: An Image Library’. The society is using the money to hire eight part-time annotators, who will help to compile images and videos for the site. Nature caught up with molecular biologist Caroline Kane, from the University of California, Berkeley, who is delaying her retirement to be principal investigator on the project....

For capturing the sun’s copious energy, there are basically two available engineering models: photovoltaic (PV) cells that turn it into flowing electrons or photosynthetic plant cells that turn it into plant food. So which does the job better? After all, such a judgment might help inform policymakers on whether to pursue biofuels or solar electricity. But the question admits no easy answer, because it begs the deeper question of which one values more: the sheer quantity of electrons produced—so-called efficiency—or the transformation of sunlight into stored chemical energy?...

In the past half a century psychotherapy research has blossomed, with thousands of studies confirming its positive effects for a wide array of clinical problems, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders and sexual dysfunction. Yet in recent years, intense controversy over whether and how to put these findings into practice has erupted, further widening the “scientist-practitioner gap,” the deep gulf that has separated many researchers and psychotherapists for decades. The current debate centers on the growing use of empirically supported therapies, or ESTs, which are specific therapies for specific problems–for example, depression and bulimia–that meet certain criteria (such as a given number of well-designed studies showing positive effects) for treatment efficacy....

Psychologists often find it difficult to help first responders —police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel —overcome emotional scars that arise after witnessing terrible scenes of death and injury. Hurricane Katrina may have increased the complexity of post-traumatic treatment even further. After the hurricane, emergency personnel had to work endless hours, witness people die in their arms, and stumble over drowned bodies underwater at their feet. But as many of them noted in televised interviews, what made matters far worse was feeling powerless....

It has been almost a quarter century since the majority of nations signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, agreeing to “limit dangerous anthropogenic [human] interference with the climate system.” And yes, nearly 25 years since the world agreed to prevent serious impacts on global food supply, the natural environment and the economy. This December, 195 nations will be heading to Paris for the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to discuss yet again how to accomplish what they all promised nearly a generation ago....

Late last week, the Department of Health and Human Services classified formaldehyde as “a known carcinogen,” adding its verdict to two similar reports released by key agencies since 2009. But despite the growing scientific consensus about how formaldehyde can affect human health, it remains to be seen if the studies will lead to tighter U.S. formaldehyde regulations. As we’ve previously reported, the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to update its chemical risk assessment for formaldehyde since 1998, but has been stalled repeatedly by the chemical manufacturing industry....

The federal government must spend up to $12 billion to improve the nation’s flood maps and should do more to steer development out of flood-prone areas, according to two recent studies that warn about increasing flood damage from climate change. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has produced flood maps covering only one-third of the nation’s 3.5 million miles of streams and 46% of shoreline, the Association of State Floodplain Managers said in a recent report....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Talking to one’s self isn’t just for preschoolers and wild-eyed conspiracy theorists. Consider these scenarios: trying to remember what you needed at the store, working to stay calm when something makes you angry, rehearsing asking for a raise or a date, calculating a tip or other mental math, looking for your lost phone, peering into a jammed photocopier, or trying to psych yourself up for a race or game....

When it comes to insect flight, bigger is usually better. As wings shrink, air friction overwhelms flight power—that’s why dragonflies soar as houseflies sputter. But a beetle the size of a grain of sand flips this maxim on its head. The featherwing beetle (Paratuposa placentis), less than half a millimeter long, is smaller than some single-celled amoebas. At this scale air becomes syrupy, and scientists once believed the beetles simply drifted wherever the wind blew them....

The atomic force microscope is a powerful tool in physics, able to image individual atoms by relying on a tiny probe dragged across a surface. Responding to the repulsive forces from the atoms it encounters, the probe gauges the topographical contours of the surface like a needle tracing the inside of a record groove. A paper published online recently in Nature Physics proposes what might be the ultimate scale-down of such scanning-probe approaches—using a single atom, suspended in space, as a probe tip....

Adding to the growing compendium of Kuiper belt objects, astronomers have spotted two new moons orbiting Pluto. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope from May of last year show two tiny dots revolving around the same center of gravity as the ninth planet and its largest moon, Charon. Reporting the finding today in Nature, the researchers speculate that the tiny companions formed in the same cataclysmic collision that produced Charon....