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HED: Science Moves and Shakes Time’s Top 100 List DEK: Scientists, engineers and tech developers earn spots on magazine’s list of the year’s most influential people Byline: Jennifer Hackett This year 14 scientists, engineers and technology developers earned spots on Time magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People. The categories include pioneers, leaders, icons, titans and artists, and most of this year’s names were in the pioneer category. Scientific American looks back on its coverage of these groundbreaking individuals....

The early Earth may have looked much like Iceland—where lava fields stretch as far as the eye can see, inky mountainsides tower above the clouds and stark black sand beaches outline the land. But the planet’s color scheme gradually became less bleak. Today it also includes paler rocks, like the ash-colored granite of Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Scientists remain uncertain as to when the world started this transition, but new evidence is narrowing the time frame....

Key concepts Biology Chemistry Chemical signals Entomology Repellents Introduction Have you ever had ants ruin your picnic? Commercial ant repellents can keep them away, but who wants to spray poison near their food? In this activity, you can investigate the effectiveness of some less toxic solutions that you may have around your home. Armed with your discoveries, you may be able to keep your next picnic from turning into an ant buffet!...

Black chess pieces move across a hand-drawn red-and-gray chessboard. A black-framed mirror, placed in front of the board, reflects the progress of rooks and bishops across the space. Except that something is not quite right. The white queen, standing at the center of the board, exists only in the mirror reflection. In the foreground, the physical board’s central squares appear incongruously empty. The Phantom Queen Illusion, conceived by U.K. magician Matt Pritchard, astonished worldwide viewers last December, winning first prize in the 2021 Best Illusion of the Year Contest....

There is no English translation for the German word schadenfreude—that small, private rush of glee in response to someone else’s misfortune. But everyone recognizes the emotion, even if he or she might not have a word for it (or admit to feeling it). Tabloids have long relied on people’s fascination with public failures: moralizing politicians or entitled actresses disgraced for their peccadilloes. And in recent years schadenfreude has become a prime-time staple, with models, boyfriends, parents, overweight people and recovering addicts, among others, routinely humiliated on cable television....

New York Yankee great Derek Jeter usually comes up smelling like a rose. But according to mid-August news reports, Jeter will soon also smell like “chilled grapefruit, clean oakmoss and spice.” Those odors are the elements of the shortstop’s new men’s perfume–I mean cologne–to be sold under the name Driven. (It’s the scent that says, “I’m not stopping at second base.”) Athletes thus join movie stars and other celebrities in having their own signature fragrances, for sale to the malodorous masses....

The term “2-degree stress test” has worked its way into investors’ lexicon. After the Paris climate agreement in December, stockholders filed a record number of resolutions related to climate change, including requests at electric utilities to simulate—or stress test—how they would operate under the agreement. More than 42 percent of shareholders at power company AES Corp. voted this month in support of a resolution for a 2-degree-Celsius test, and, in a guiding document published today, a group of 270 institutional investors said the financial risks of climate change directly threaten the electric utility business....

Introduction Do you have to see it to believe it? You might want to rethink your strategy. Scientists now know that what we perceive can be very different from what is really there. Our brains are quite clever in helping us interact with the world, but they can be fooled. Try this activity, and you will find out how! Background We see with our eyes, but also with our brains. Our eyes register incoming light; electrical pulses transport the information to the brain, which processes it and informs us of what we see....

Dr. Anthony Szema is used to seeing patients with red eyes and runny noses. But in the past couple of years, the New York-based allergist has been faced with an onslaught of patients complaining their symptoms are starting earlier and hitting harder than ever before. Szema believes climate change is a culprit in the extended severe allergy seasons. And he is one of a small number of physicians who are beginning to talk to their patients about it....

Key concepts Cells DNA Genes From National Science Education Standards: Reproduction and heredity Introduction What do you have in common with a banana? Even though we might not look alike, all living things—bananas and people included—are made up of the same basic material. Just like houses are made up of smaller units such as bricks, all living things are made up trillions of microscopic building blocks called cells. Within an organism, each cell contains a complete set of “blueprints”....

By Christopher D’AngeloLihue, Hawaii (Reuters) - Lawmakers on the tropical island of Kauai, Hawaii, on Wednesday approved a hotly contested measure aimed at reining in widespread pesticide use by companies testing new genetically modified crops on the island.The Kauai County Council passed the bill by a vote of six to one after months of protests by islanders and mainland U.S. groups who wanted to see a range of broad controls on the global agrichemical companies that have found the island’s tropical climate ideal for year-round testing of new biotech crops....

The fuel of the future could be hydrogen—if it can be made cheaply enough. Currently, electrolyzers (machines that split water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen) need a catalyst, namely platinum, to run; ditto fuel cells to recombine that hydrogen with oxygen, which produces electricity. The problem is that the precious metal costs about $1,700 to $2,000 per ounce, which means that hydrogen would be an uneconomical fuel source unless a less costly catalyst can be found....

We are approaching the millennial anniversary of the first meaningful written description of how lenses and light could be used to magnify objects. It was in 1011 that Arab scientist Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen) began writing the Book of Optics, which described the properties of a magnifying glass, principles that later led to the invention of the microscope. The entrants in the 2009 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition provide fitting tribute to nearly 1,000 years of making the invisible visible....

Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past....

Editor’s note: This article is the second of two addressing the problems posed by aging electronic devices entering the waste stream. See also, Trashed Tech: Where Do Old Cell Phones, TVs and PCs Go to Die? The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that consumers and businesses need to recycle old PCs, televisions and cell phones to keep a lid on growing piles of electronic trash. Too bad the EPA lacks the legal power to mandate such action....

From Nature magazine Rapid urbanization will take a heavy toll on public health if city planning and development do not incorporate measures to tackle air pollution, warns a report launched in Beijing last month. The report, compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva, Switzerland, and the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC) project in Boulder, Colorado, was launched as part of the IGAC Open Science Conference on Atmospheric Chemistry in the Anthropocene....

Several anthropological studies show that, just like other pre-Hispanic natives, those who inhabited the desert in northern Chile faced periods of food shortages, severe weather conditions, crippling diseases and violence. However, a new analysis of a stress hormone in hair samples from 19 mummies of people who lived between 500 and 1,500 years ago suggests that perhaps not all of them had as stressful an existence as previously thought. This interpretation “is different from what had been assumed so far,” says Hermann Niemeyer, head of the Laboratory of Organic Chemistry at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Chile, and one of the authors of the study....

As if the debate surrounding the risks of increasingly popular e-cigarette and marijuana-vaporizing devices wasn’t hot enough already, the Dutch company E-Njoint, BV, has released what it calls the first electronic joint, igniting new concerns about the safety of e-smoking products. Whether the new offering, which resembles a classic marijuana cigarette, should rightly be called a joint is debatable, given that it holds not a touch of cannabis. The product, named the E-njoint Disposable, is what the company calls a “100 percent legal electronic joint” that contains “no THC, tobacco or nicotine,” making it “harmless and 100 percent legal....

By Francesca TrianniNEW YORK (Reuters) - Manhattan, an island with miles of waterfront, will finally get its own beach.Just minutes from Wall Street, the Empire State Building and other landmarks that define New York City, a playground of sand and surf will be created out of a strip of fenced-off wasteland in the southern tip of the island.The $7 million Brooklyn Bridge Beach plan, whose details were unveiled on Thursday, covers 11,000 square feet area under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, at the mouth of the East River....

By Scott Malone, Jill Serjeant and Laila Kearney BOSTON/NEW YORK, Jan 27 (Reuters) - A blizzard swept across the northeastern United States on Tuesday, dropping more than a foot (30 cm) of snow across Massachusetts and Connecticut even as its impact on New York City fell short of dire predictions. The governors of New York and New Jersey lifted travel bans they had imposed a day earlier and New York City’s subway system was set to restart, though officials urged people who did not have to drive to stay off snow-covered roadways....