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Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is one of the most damaging mental illnesses. By itself, this severe mental illness accounts for up to 10 percent of patients in psychiatric care and 20 percent of those who have to be hospitalized. The defining characteristic of BPD is a pervasive instability in the patient’s life, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships. BPD patients also have difficulty controlling their impulses and regulating their emotions....

Extreme heat threatens to effect all of California in coming years, prompting state officials to outline life-saving measures in an adaptation report released this week. Average annual temperatures have already jumped in California by more than 1 degree Fahrenheit, and it has exceeded 2 F in some areas, according to the analysis by the California Natural Resources Agency. The daily maximum average temperature is expected to rise by as much as 5....

It takes power to make power—even with a solar grand plan. From the mining of quartz sand to the coating with ethylene-vinyl acetate, manufacturing a photovoltaic (PV) solar cell requires energy—most often derived from the burning of fossil fuels. But a new analysis finds that even accounting for all the energy and waste involved, PV power would cut air pollution—including the greenhouse gases that cause climate change—by nearly 90 percent if it replaced fossil fuels....

Inventions exist today that would have boggled the mind just a generation ago. I play Scrabble daily with people all over the country on a smartphone that I carry in my pocket. This device is remarkably versatile and powerful. Why, just yesterday it edited a note I was writing so that a particularly objectionable word choice was corrected to the much more acceptable “duchess,” despite the fact that the two words had only the second and third letters in common....

Stacy Hodgkinson and Amy Lewin had the best of intentions when they enrolled the pregnant 15-year-old in their study. The psychologists were evaluating an educational program for young parents-to-be, and the teenager met all the inclusion criteria: she was 15–32 weeks pregnant with her first child, under 19 years of age, and her partner — who did not live with her — was willing to participate in the study. There was just one problem....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Magnifying Taste: New Chemicals Trick the Brain into Eating Less” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Contrary to old models (below left), the tongue does not have regions that detect one type of flavor. Instead taste buds embedded in papilla (bumps) across the tongue sense all flavors. Each bud contains elongated taste cells that respond to sweet, salty, sour, bitter or umami (savory)....

A compound whose odd electrical behavior has puzzled physicists for decades could turn out to be a boon for quantum physics and electronic-device makers. When theorists proposed in 2005 that it should be possible to find materials that conduct electricity at the surface while the rest of the sample behaves as an insulator, physicists were intrigued. They wanted to study the quantum effects that should emerge in such materials, and to explore applications in low-power electronics and quantum computing....

Every month, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN—the longest-running magazine in the U.S. and an authoritative voice in science, technology and innovation—provides insight into scientific topics that affect our daily lives and capture our imagination, establishing the vital bridge between science and public policy. Available on iPad, print, and digital formats. • FUTURE OF EDUCATION Researchers are finding that video games have great educational potential. A well-designed game can exercise evidence-based reasoning, problem solving and collaboration in ways that traditional pedagogy often does not....

Most people picture human memory as something resembling a secure metal vault into which we cram our valuable—and not so valuable—thoughts for safekeeping. The people with the biggest vaults, then, can keep the most stuff. They know the most and make the fewest mistakes. As this special report shows, however, human memory is a far cry from a passive storage unit. It behaves more like a seamstress who sews concepts from threads of vital information while snipping away extraneous material....

It came as quite a shock recently when the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard turned out to come from England. I had assumed it would be from the U.S., but no. Anyway, here it is. A government minister said that some pregnant British teenagers were purposely smoking during their entire pregnancies to try to have low-birth-weight babies, which would make for easier deliveries. Even more breathtaking than smoking itself, isn’t it?...

Science policy experts have called for urgent measures to be put in place to prevent strains of yeast that are capable of producing opiate drugs from falling into the hands of criminals. The prospect of ‘home-brewed heroin’ has been raised after new research describes how a key enzyme in the pathway from glucose to morphine and other opiates has for the first time been successfully expressed in yeast. The finding means that the complete biosynthetic pathway for the family of compounds that includes codeine and morphine is close to being achieved in yeast....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has issued a “behavioural standards” guide to combat pollution and reduce environmental damage, urging people to do everything from walking and riding bicycles to buying goods with less packaging. The Chinese government has identified public participation as a key element in its efforts to reverse some of the environmental damage done by more than three decades of breakneck economic growth. The list of eight standards, published on the environment ministry’s website (www....

Key concepts Plant biology Cloning Reproduction Asexual reproduction Introduction Around Saint Patrick’s Day the color green seems to be everywhere—from hats to shamrocks. For this Saint Paddy’s Day, you could show off your own green creation…by cloning a plant! Many sci–fi tales of cloned organisms have been based on the actual scientific method for cloning animals or plants. In the real world the cloning of plants is often used in modern agriculture....

If there were a battle hymn against antibiotic resistance, it would have one common refrain: Every inappropriate prescription or insufficient dose strengthens the enemy. It may kill weak bacteria but it won’t eliminate stronger, drug-resistant ones that can move in and multiply. Eventually those robust microbes can outsmart available drugs, and even pass on survival instructions to other bacterial strains.That’s why most doctors—along with the World Health Organization and the U....

In Silicon Valley the Campbell Union School District’s sprinklers used to dutifully water the soccer fields and gardens at 12 campuses even during spring showers. Temporarily shutting off each of the 45 irrigation control boxes, by hand, wasn’t worth the custodians’ time. But in 2009 the district installed new “smart” controllers that automatically adjust daily watering to the weather. Each box, fitted with a microprocessor and antenna, receives local real-time weather information by satellite from the WeatherTRAK climate center supercomputer run by Petaluma, Calif....

Every mother knows that newborns are social creatures just hours after birth. They prefer to look at faces over objects, and they even imitate facial expressions. Now a study sug­gests that the propensity for social interactions exists in the womb. Twins begin interacting as early as the 14th week of gestation. Researchers at the University of Turin and the University of Parma in Italy used ultrasonography, a technique for imaging internal body structures, to track the motion of five pairs of twin fetuses in daily 20-minute sessions....

There’s nothing like firing off a carefully crafted e-mail and then waiting for what seems like an eternity for a reply. When you finally do get an answer, you might still be frustrated. What do you make of the fact that it is only 10 words long? We now have some clues about typical e-mail response patterns, thanks to a recent study drawing on 16 billion e-mails sent by more than two million people....

Atmospheric CO2 was the primary driver of a 400,000-year global warming event, known as the middle Eocene climatic optimum (MECO), according to a new study. The finding, which could help climatologists better understand the precise relationship between CO2 concentration and climate change today, is described in the November 5 issue of Science. The climate trend across the entire Eocene, an epoch between 55 million and 34 million years ago, was actually characterized by long and gradual cooling....

The United States is in the grip of an unprecedented public health crisis—one in which well-meaning doctors have played a part. Between 1999 and 2014 sales of prescription opioid drugs nearly quadrupled. In 2012 alone, physicians issued 259 million opioid prescriptions—enough to give a bottle of pills to every adult in the country. And in 2015 more than half of all overdose deaths in the U.S. involved opioids—either pain medications, such as OxyContin and Vicodin, or illicit substances, such as opium and heroin....

Editor’s note: The Obama administration announced on January 17, 2017, that it would give a second payment of $500 million to the Green Climate Fund, which brings the U.S.’s total contribution to $1 billion. The announcement comes just days before President-elect Donald Trump enters office Developing countries need an almost incomprehensible amount of money—likely trillions of dollars—to help them mitigate and adapt to climate change. The U.S. and other wealthy nations, seen as the main polluters, have agreed to pitch in....