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Remember the Pillars of Creation? Since the Hubble Space Telescope captured this spectacular photograph in 1995, it has appeared on posters, T-shirts and screen savers. Although everybody seems to be familiar with the pillars, the details of how they formed have been unclear. A computer simulation may have finally solved the mystery. Using the physics of gas flows, Cardiff University astronomer Scott Balfour and his colleagues have reproduced the famous pillar structures almost exactly....

Climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig has been studying the impacts of global warming on New York City since the 1990s, and was part of a group that analyzed the unique risks faced by the Big Apple way back in 2001. The group’s report predicted what a once-a-century superstorm like Hurricane Sandy proved: the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel between major boroughs flooded, La Guardia Airport runways were underwater, and so on. More recently Rosenzweig helped chair the New York City Panel on Climate Change, brought together to update the city on the latest climate science and to help city agencies prepare to adapt....

I. Imperfect Information Focusing on facts is generally an effective first step to gaining clarity about a complex or elusive topic. In the case of privacy, the facts are denied to us. Those who have reduced our privacy, whether they are state or commercial actors, prefer that we do not reduce theirs. The National Security Agency (nsa), for example, long hid the full extent of its vast electronic surveillance operations. Even after the recent leaks by former NSA contractor Edward J....

There is a new sponge that researchers hope could absorb greenhouse gases from power plants one day. In a recent study, scientists at Lehigh University created a new material that pulls carbon dioxide and methane selectively from a stream of other gases. In theory, the new spongy substance could sop up heat-trapping gases emitted from the burning of coal or natural gas. “There is no fundamental difference in doing this in the lab versus doing it at industrial scale,” said Kai Landskron, an assistant chemistry professor at Lehigh University and a co-author of the study, which appeared in Nature Communications in July....

When red-eyed cicadas start crawling out of the ground and up tree branches, they almost always cause a stir. Such events are happening right now in parts of Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina. The insects’ mating call creates a cacophony of white noise and causes excitement about a phenomenon that is supposed to occur only once every 13 or 17 years. But there are more than a dozen separate groups of “periodical” cicadas that appear regularly in the U....

People with Asperger’s syndrome, a variety of autism spectrum disorder, characteristically have trouble perceiving the mental states of others, making social interactions difficult. But many adults with the disorder lead highly functional lives, leaving researchers to wonder how their brains differ from those of neurologically normal adults and children. A report published online yesterday in Science shows that many adults with Asperger’s who cannot spontaneously anticipate another person’s state of mind, can still correctly guess it when given a simple verbal prompt to....

The science of weather—from cloud formation (right) to approaches to slowing and reversing climate change—is clearly and succinctly explained in this wide-ranging, well-illustrated volume. EXCERPT A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe by Marcelo Gleiser. Free Press, 2010 For centuries scientists have been searching for a single theory of the universe that reveals an elegantly simple order behind the apparent complexity of the natural world....

It’s often said that the bacteria and other microbes in our body outnumber our own cells by about ten to one. That’s a myth that should be forgotten, say researchers in Israel and Canada. The ratio between resident microbes and human cells is more likely to be one-to-one, they calculate. A ‘reference man’ (one who is 70 kilograms, 20–30 years old and 1.7 metres tall) contains on average about 30 trillion human cells and 39 trillion bacteria, say Ron Milo and Ron Sender at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Shai Fuchs at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada....

A team of researchers looking for ways to expand the use of wind power just finished measuring wind strengths in one of the toughest areas in the world to study it, the gusty, meandering Columbia River Gorge. The 80-mile gorge between Washington and Oregon amounts to a freeway for winds entering from the Pacific Ocean. It already hosts one of the world’s largest collections of wind farms at its eastern end....

Our ability to pilot a car or airplane—or even to walk through city streets—has been completely transformed by the invention of the Global Positioning System (GPS). How did we navigate, though, before we had GPS? Recent work has shown that the mammalian brain uses an incredibly sophisticated GPS-like tracking system of its own to guide us from one location to the next. Like the GPS in our phones and cars, our brain’s system assesses where we are and where we are heading by integrating multiple signals relating to our position and the passage of time....

Parents around the country have voiced alarm since the 2015 revelations of staggeringly high lead levels in the drinking water of Flint, Mich., and more recent reports of spikes in other cities and states. It is easy to understand why people are upset. “Children are particularly vulnerable to the neurotoxic effects of lead,” states the World Health Organization on its Web site. It goes on: “Even relatively low levels of exposure can cause serious and in some cases irreversible neurological damage....

On a research vessel in the waters off Greece’s Amvrakikos Gulf, Joan Gonzalvo watched a female bottlenose dolphin in obvious distress. Over and over again, the dolphin pushed a newborn calf, almost certainly her own, away from the observers’ boat and against the current with her snout and pectoral fins. It was as if she wanted to nudge her baby into motion—but to no avail. The baby was dead. Floating under direct sunlight on a hot day, its body quickly began to decay; occasionally the mother removed pieces of dead skin and loose tissue from the corpse....

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth. —Richard Avedon (1923–2004) Portraiture as an art form strives to capture its subject’s innermost nature. Therefore, a successful portrait may be more veridical, or truthful, than casual observation of the individual depicted. Although accurate representation is intrinsic to photography, the illusions featured in this article circumvent limitations that are skin deep....

For the first time ever, an asteroid or comet from another star has been caught hurtling through our solar system, astronomers announced late Thursday. Provisionally designated A/2017 U1, the object appears to be less than a half-kilometer in diameter and is traveling at just over 40 kilometers per second—faster than humanity’s speediest outbound space probes. Because this is the first object of its type to be found, there are as yet no official rules for naming it, and its discoverers have balked at suggesting anything besides “Interstellar....

By Meredith WadmanOn the same day in late May that J. Craig Venter and his co-authors published their synthetic bacterial genome, President Barack Obama asked his recently formed bioethics commission to tackle the implications of the milestone study as its “first order of business,” and report back to him in six months.A large part of the task before the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues is to tell the U....

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Dutch officials said on Sunday bird flu had been found at another poultry farm in the Netherlands, the fourth in recent weeks. The Economics Ministry said the farm’s 28,000 birds were being destroyed. It said the flu infection was of the same H5 variety found at farms across Europe and Asia in recent months. It was not yet clear how infectious the strain was, the ministry said. A ban on transporting poultry products has been imposed and the four other farms within that radius are being inspected for signs of bird flu, the ministry said....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Is China’s Pollution Poisoning Its Children?” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Tongliang children born in 2002, when the local coal-burning power plant was still open, scored worse on tests of motor and social skills than did their counterparts born in 2005, one year after the plant stopped operating. Researchers classified children as developmentally delayed if they scored below 85 on a standard assessment known as the Gesell test....

By Natalie Thomas BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s smog is making it harder for foreign firms to convince top executives to work in the country, the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing said on Wednesday, offering some of the strongest evidence yet on how pollution is hurting recruitment. Some 48 percent of the 365 foreign companies that replied to the chamber’s annual survey, which covers businesses in China’s northern cities, said concerns over air quality were turning senior executives away....

On a shelf in a library in Texas sits a small green volume, originally published 150 years ago and now generally recognized as one of the most important scientific books ever written. Its future success was not at all apparent when this first-edition copy of On the Origin of Species was printed, however. As Charles Darwin finished the proofs of his new work, he drew up a short list of important colleagues who should receive advance copies....

A common belly bug once thought to be harmful may have beneficial effects early in life. Researchers at the New York University (N.Y.U.) Langone Medical Center have found that a lack of Helicobacter pylori—a microbe that thrives in the human stomach—may be linked to childhood asthma and other allergies. They report in The Journal of Infectious Diseases that children ages three to 13 years were 59 percent less likely to have asthma and 69 percent less likely to have hay fever and other childhood allergies if they tested positive for the bacterium....