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A paper published in Nature today could dispel a cloud over the hopes of turning a patient’s own cells into perfectly matched replacement tissues. Scientists first reported in 2007 that a person’s cells could be reprogramed to an embryo-like state, and so could form any type of cell in the body. Medical researchers immediately imagined using these ‘induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells’ to create an endless supply of genetically matched replacement tissues to treat a range of diseases: fresh pancreatic tissue for diabetics, for example, or new nerve cells for people with Parkinson’s....

WASHINGTON—Two high-ranking lawmakers on the Senate committee that crafts legislation about health and oversees public health agencies disclosed that they or their families traded in tobacco company stock while they were on the committee, according to a STAT review. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) reported purchasing at least $15,000 worth of stock in Philip Morris International. Sen. Patty Murray’s (D-Wash.) husband, meanwhile, owned an account whose manager bought and sold about $1,000 worth of stock in Reynolds American while Murray was the top Democrat on the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions....

By Manuel Mogato and Roli NgTACLOBAN, Philippines (Reuters) - One of the most powerful storms ever recorded killed at least 10,000 people in the central Philippines, a senior police official said on Sunday, with huge waves sweeping away coastal villages and devastating one of the main cities in the region.Super typhoon Haiyan destroyed about 70 to 80 percent of structures in its path as it tore through Leyte province on Friday, said police chief superintendent Elmer Soria, before weakening and heading west for Vietnam....

Quick, huge and deadly, the common hippo is the king of Africa’s rivers. Now fossils suggest that hippos assumed power swiftly and that changes in vegetation helped to propel their rise. An analysis of hippo teeth excavated at an Ethiopian fossil site suggests that the hippo went from bit player to boss of the waterways in less than 1.5 million years. Earlier research had established that hippos exploded in abundance and diversity at some point in their history, but how long this ‘hippopotamine event’ took and when it happened was unknown....

French companies started digging the Panama Canal in 1881 but there were too many challenges and the work ground to a halt. U.S. Pres. Teddy Roosevelt saw opportunities for trade and for American prestige in being able to finish and control the canal, and he pushed for the U.S. to take over its construction in 1904. The canal locks were the most technically difficult part of building the canal. These huge concrete structures were over 300 meters long, and each series of two or three locks can move a ship 25 meters up from sea level to the canal level and the same distance down at the other end....

Urban landscapes are embodiments of human aspirations and dreams. They represent the spirit of an age and personify the minds and hearts of the people who inhabit them. Archaeological excavations of ancient cities, such as the magnificently preserved ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, bring to life our distant past. If we could peer into the future, we would want to know what our cities will look like to understand who we will become....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. How secure do you feel on the web? It seems like every day there are more revelations about the government tapping your phone calls, reading your email, and watching what you do online. In this week’s episode, Tech Talker will be talking about the dark side of the web that Google won’t show you....

The older people get, the more trusting they become—a tendency that can be dangerous because it puts elders at risk for exploitation and abuse. But why does it happen? A new study suggests that older people have trouble identifying untrustworthy faces because of an age-related drop in activity in the anterior insula, a brain region that may play a role in assessing trust and risk. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, asked 119 adults who were at least 55 years old and 24 younger adults to look at pictures of faces that exhibited either trustworthy, neutral or untrustworthy qualities (according to previous analysis)....

You probably know the GIF as the perfect vehicle for sharing memes and reactions. We believe the format can go further, that it has real power to capture science and explain research in short, digestible loops. Here is your special Halloween edition of GIF-able science. Enjoy and spooky loop on. Terrifyingly Fast Ants Credit: Sarah Pfeffer and Harald Wolf Not many organisms can survive the harsh climate of the Sahara, where daytime temperatures can reach 140 degrees Fahrenheit....

In case you hadn’t noticed, computers are hot—literally. A laptop can pump out thigh-baking heat, and data centers consume an estimated 200 terawatt-hours every year, comparable to the energy consumption of some medium-sized countries. The carbon footprint of information and communication technologies as a whole is close to that of fuel use in the aviation industry. And as computer circuitry gets ever smaller and more densely packed, it becomes more prone to melting from the energy it dissipates as heat....

The “blackest black” paint, famed for its thermal camouflage potential, has long absorbed 99.9 percent of public attention. Now it’s time to shed some light on the other end of the practical paint spectrum: the “whitest white.” Research shows that surfaces coated with a newly formulated white coloring reflect 98.1 percent of sunlight, creating a powerful cooling effect—any of the electricity required by commercial air conditioners. This coating absorbs just 1....

Measuring the masses of tiny objects takes a tiny scale. To that end, researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Leti, an institute at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, have built a new mass-identifying device with dimensions measuring in the nanometers and microns. The apparatus can determine the masses of individual molecules in real time—the first device of its kind to do so—the researchers reported in a study published in September in Nature Nanotechnology....

The following is an excerpt from Permanent Emergency: Inside the TSA and the Fight for the Future of American Security, by Kip Hawley and Nathan Means(Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). One day in 2007 Stephanie Rowe, who was in charge of the identity- based programs at TSA, including Registered Traveler, accompanied me to a meeting with Ted Olson, one of the most respected and powerful lawyers in the country. Stephanie, who normally poured her considerable energies into solving TSA’s mission challenges rather than political issues, had no idea who he was at the time, but one glance at the marble and dark wood accents in Olson’s downtown Washington office told her that she was definitely in one of the preeminent halls of DC power....

(Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the January 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine. We are posting it because of related news regarding swine flu.) On September 7, 1918, at the height of World War I, a soldier at an army training camp outside Boston came to sick call with a high fever. Doctors diagnosed him with meningitis but changed their minds the next day when a dozen more soldiers were hospitalized with respiratory symptoms....

Numerous studies over more than two decades have demonstrated a robust relationship between climate and the dynamics of human diseases, such as cholera, malaria and dengue. Changes in climate, including both long-term warming trends and short-term climate variability, might affect patterns of disease. Xavier Rodó, a computational ecologist and climate dynamics specialist at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies in Spain, spoke to Nature about how climate modelling could be used to help prepare for future disease outbreaks—and the obstacles he has faced in implementing such systems....

Decisions concerning the products we buy, the Web sites we click on, the movies we watch and even where we send our children to college are all affected by rankings. But did you ever wonder who or what is making all these rating decisions? Are they subjective opinions, or is something else going on under the covers? Put yourself in Mark Zuckerberg’s place when he rated and ranked the women of Harvard University for his Facemash site that evolved into Facebook....

We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see the first Mars helicopter lift off. NASA had originally aimed to conduct the first Red Planet flight of its Ingenuity helicopter—the first-ever powered flight on a world beyond Earth—on Sunday (April 11). A high-speed rotor-spinning test on Friday (April 9) didn’t go as planned, however, pushing the debut back until Wednesday (April 14) at the earliest. Now, after analyzing the issue over the weekend, the Ingenuity team has concluded “that minor modification and reinstallation of Ingenuity’s flight control software is the most robust path forward,” officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California, which manages Ingenuity’s technology-demonstrating mission, wrote in an update Monday (April 12)....

The promise of a nice dinner might not always win over a woman, but for some male fish a tasty-looking lure seems to get the girl pretty reliably. The trick is to make sure the offering resembles the local cuisine, and then they can reel in the ladies, hook, line and sinker. Swordtail characins (Corynopoma riisei) that live in the rivers of Trinidad feast mostly on hapless bugs that plop into the water from surrounding vegetation....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Lakes of the Hudson Bay Lowlands, in northeast Canada, are showing evidence of abrupt change in one of the last Arctic regions of the world to have experienced global warming, according to Canadian research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal. The research team consisting of Drs. Kathleen Rühland, John Smol, and Neal Michelutti from Queen’s University Ontario, Dr....

In 2002 Seth Lloyd, a professor of quantum computing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a formula estimating the number of bits that could fit in the universe. A “bit” is a fundamental unit of information that represents the answer to a yes or no question. A computer stores bits in a transistor, but a bit can also be encoded in the state of a physical particle, such as the spin of an electron....