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When Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico in September 2017, it took 3,000 lives and cut off basic services on some parts of the island for nearly a year. The devastation was not restricted to that island, however. Maria’s 155-mile-per-hour winds also ripped into a 38-acre islet called Cayo Santiago that lies a half mile off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. This small outpost is home to a colony of some 1,500 rhesus monkeys that has been the subject of hundreds of scientific studies—and the impact of the hurricane on the animals is producing still more....

A colleague of mine once noted that every morning there is a long line of customers stretching out from a famous Parisian bakery into the street. “I wish someone would wait for my scientific papers with as much anticipation as Parisians eagerly stand by for their baguettes,” he said. There is one exception to this wish, however. It involves fresh scientific evidence that we are not be the only intelligent species in the cosmos....

Let’s do some sleep math. You lost two hours of sleep every night last week because of a big project due on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday, you slept in, getting four extra hours. Come Monday morning, you were feeling so bright-eyed, you only had one cup of coffee, instead of your usual two. But don’t be duped by your apparent vim and vigor: You’re still carrying around a heavy load of sleepiness, or what experts call “sleep debt”—in this case something like six hours, almost a full nights’ sleep....

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — In an industrial section of a San Francisco Bay Area suburb, the sleek new office building of Genentech, a biotechnology firm, opened last week. The company knows it will be energy efficient because it is the first project to take advantage of a cutting-edge efficiency testing facility that was developed last year in nearby Berkeley. “Building 35” was developed on a rotating test bed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to model real-life conditions as closely as possible....

By Eric HandA once-favoured space probe to study dark energy is struggling to get off the ground, as three agencies in the United States and Europe tussle over the details of a potential international mission.The rise and fall this year of the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) – a satellite meant to pin down the repulsive force that is accelerating the Universe’s expansion – is partly due to strife between two US agencies, NASA and the Department of Energy (DOE), and a third potential partner, the European Space Agency (ESA)....

Treatment: Live attenuated 17D yellow fever-dengue chimera Maker: Sanofi Pasteur Stage: Phase II, results scheduled for early 2008. Why It Matters Dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease, and its life-threatening variant, dengue hemorrhagic fever, are probably the most widespread reemerging diseases worldwide. They hospitalize some 500,000 people annually, mostly children, and kill more than 20,000 per year. They are caused by one of four closely related viruses, each different enough that developing immunity against one guarantees nothing against the others....

Nestled in a plastic box, in an ordinary laboratory freezer on the second floor of a concrete building in Waltham, Massachusetts, is a clear test tube that contains a concoction of astronomical proportions. The library frozen within, a collection of chemical compounds owned by London-based pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), contains as many as 1 trillion unique DNA-tagged molecules — ten times the number of stars in the Milky Way. This and other such libraries are helping pharma companies and biotechnology firms to quickly identify candidate drugs that can latch onto the proteins involved in disease, especially those proteins that have proved difficult to target....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - Some half a million cases of cancer a year are due to people being overweight or obese, and the problem is particularly acute in North America, the World Health Organization’s cancer research agency said on Wednesday. In a study published in the journal The Lancet Oncology, the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said high body mass index (BMI) has now become a major cancer risk factor, responsible for some 3....

In the months after he had surgery to fix his defective heart valve, Bruce Stutz didn’t feel quite the same. It wasn’t his physical fitness that was subpar, although that did require some post-op retraining, but rather his mental capacity. “I couldn’t muster the concentration to deal with the problem,” he wrote in a 2003 article for Scientific American. During surgery, Stutz had been hooked up to a heart–lung machine, also called a cardiopulmonary-bypass pump, for the two-hours of a procedure to keep his blood oxygenated and flowing while his heart was stopped....

Ah, the innocuous out-of-office notification message. Who in the corporate world hasn’t used it at one time or another? Sure, the out-of-office function built into Microsoft Outlook and similar email software is great for letting colleagues, customers, vendors and even friends and acquaintances know that you’re lying on a beach in Hawaii, sipping a Mai-Tai or two — and that you won’t be able to respond. Since you can’t, or don’t want to, respond while you’re on vacation or away for some other reason, you include a way for people to contact you in an emergency....

By Erik Kirschbaum and Belinda GoldsmithBERLIN/LONDON (Reuters) - Hurricane-force Storm Xaver blasted towards mainland Europe on Thursday after cutting transport and power in northern Britain and killing three people in what meteorologists warned could be the worst storm to hit the continent in years.British authorities said the Thames Barrier, designed to protect London from flooding during exceptional tides, would shut on Thursday night and warned of “the most serious coastal tidal surge for over 60 years in England”....

Solar panels could produce electricity at the same price as coal- and natural gas-burning power plants by the end of this decade if countries direct resources at this rapidly advancing corner of the energy industry, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. IEA, composed mostly of European nations and the United States, found in twin studies released yesterday that solar photovoltaic (PV) and concentrated solar power (CSP) together could account for about 22 percent of global electricity production by 2050 under the right conditions....

GUATEMALA Archaeologists unearthed the largest known Mayan figurine factory. The more than 1,000-year-old workshop mass-produced intricate statues that were likely used in diplomacy as gifts to allies. NEPAL Researchers confirmed the nation’s first recorded tornado, which occurred during a devastating storm in March. The team relied on satellite imagery and posts on social media to make the identification. ANTARCTICA Emperor penguins have abandoned one of their biggest breeding colonies, possibly because of sea-ice loss....

Scientific American editors voted in recent weeks on the 20 most informative Twitter accounts to stay abreast of the latest ideas, issues and developments in science and technology. We weeded through hundreds of lists and feeds to select the most brilliant and engaging, as well as the quirkiest of the bunch. Our picks are often witty, sometimes eccentric and occasionally silly, but each brings valuable insights to his or her area of expertise....

The legendary olive trees of Puglia produce some of the finest oil in the world. Thousands of farm families have pressed the fruits for generations. The trees’ twisted trunks—some radiocarbon-dated at more than 2,500 years old—are as fundamental to the landscape here as the castles and the sea. They have persisted through centuries of invasions, wars, droughts and depressions. No matter how bad things have ever gotten, the orchards have always provided promise for the future....

People with physical disabilities are among the most vulnerable to climate change, yet scant attention has been paid to their unique challenges, according to a letter published in the journal Science. “The international research community has made good progress at including vulnerable groups such as poor communities, women, indigenous people, and youth in recent international conversations about global environmental change, but disabled populations have been mostly absent from the conversation,” researchers wrote....

For any given medical problem, it seems, there’s a research team trying to use stem cells to find a solution. In clinical trials to treat everything from diabetes to macular degeneration to ALS, researchers are injecting the cells in efforts to cure patients. But in one study expected to launch later this year, scientists hope to use stem cells in a new, highly controversial way — to reverse death. The idea of the trial, run by Philadelphia-based Bioquark, is to inject stem cells into the spinal cords of people who have been declared clinically brain-dead....

In a dramatic feat of engineering prowess, the private spaceflight company SpaceX successfully landed a reusable Falcon 9 rocket booster yesterday — the second such landing for the company, and the first successful touchdown on a ship. The two-stage Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 4:43 p.m. EDT April 8 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It carried SpaceX’s robotic Dragon cargo spacecraft, which is now on its way to the International Space Station, carrying crew supplies, station hardware and science experiments....

About 15 years ago, the Earth’s temperature was rising fast. Most climate models predicted that trend would continue, as humans continued to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Instead, the Earth’s surface temperature over the past 13 years has been mostly stable. In recent years, scientists have worked to understand why this “pause” in warming has occurred and was not predicted by models (ClimateWire Nov. 1, 2013). “The fact that [the pause] has lasted a full 13 years has really challenged the scientific community to explain this mismatch between models and observations,” said Matthew England, a climate scientist with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science....

So what do you think?” said Lee Berger. He had just opened the lids of two big wood boxes, each containing the carefully laid out fossilized bones of a humanlike skeleton from Malapa, South Africa. These two individuals, who had drawn their last breath two million years ago, had created quite a stir. Most fossils are “isolated” finds—a jawbone here, a foot bone there. Scientists then have to figure out whether the pieces belong to the same individual....