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By Laila KearneySAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Scientists are struggling to find the trigger for a disease that appears to be ravaging starfish in record numbers along the U.S. West Coast, causing the sea creatures to lose their limbs and turn to slime in a matter of days.Marine biologists and ecologists will launch an extensive survey this week along the coasts of California, Washington state and Oregon to determine the reach and source of the deadly syndrome, known as “star wasting disease....

In a bid to progress beyond the shotgun approach to fighting cancer—blasting malignant cells with toxic chemicals or radiation, which kills surrounding healthy cells in the process—researchers at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST) are using nanotechnology to develop seek-and-destroy models to zero in on and dismantle tumors without damaging nearby normal tissue. HST takes an interdisciplinary approach to biomedicine. It consists of physicians, scientists and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, Boston-area teaching hospitals and other research centers....

SEPTEMBER 1955 GEOPHYSICAL EARTH–“The historic decision of U.S. scientists to attempt to launch an artificial moon within the next three years is a symbol of man’s increasing ability to view the earth as a whole. This ability is also expressed in plans for an International Geophysical Year, for 1957. The frontispiece of this issue shows a man holding a Polynesian navigation map representing a region around the Marshall Islands. Behind the map is a globe devised in about 145 B....

Join us below at 1 P.M. Eastern on Wednesday (August 1) for a live 30-minute online chat with engineer and energy writer Melissa C. Lott, who will discuss the blackouts that have afflicted hundreds of millions of people in India this week and whether such a catastrophe could occur in the U.S. She writes for the “Plugged In” group blog with the Scientific American network which investigates the connections between energy, environment and our lives....

An analysis of 12 years’ worth of telescope data has found a signal that some physicists think could be the first detection of dark matter. Astronomers have found variations in the stream of X-rays seen by a European Space Agency observatory that matches what would be expected if axions — a hypothetical dark-matter particle — were interacting with Earth’s magnetic field. Dark matter is the name given to the substance thought to make up some 85% of all the matter in the Universe....

Edited by Dava Sobel The Squamscott River grew lazy in early summer— muskrat rose and dove heron swept the air and landed and hemlocks that had survived another century’s practice of harvesting their bark were thriving. Some suffered beaver girdles and the predation by woolly adelgids but still the pileated woodpeckers found what they required in the snags. This is how it was for us—pulling threads of hope out of the air as if we had the skill to weave them back into webs....

Of the hundreds of billions of stars that throng the Milky Way, only one is closest to the sun: a little red dwarf named Proxima Centauri, a star so dim it was unknown a century ago. Now this stellar neighbor is about to betray some of its secrets, because in October it will pass in front of another star. As the light from the distant star skirts past Proxima, the red star’s gravity will bend the beam, divulging our neighbor’s mass and perhaps even its planets....

Understanding climate sensitivity Improving models of atmospheric circulation Early warning of disastrous ’tipping points' Adapting to climate change Understanding climate sensitivity As global concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide continue to shoot upwards, researchers need a better handle on how global temperatures could respond. That means narrowing the value of ‘climate sensitivity’—the increase in temperature caused by a given rise in atmospheric CO2concentration. This number is disturbingly uncertain because it depends on poorly-understood feedback effects from clouds, water vapour and sea ice....

You might think that temporary tattoos look cool, but what if they could also collect and transmit information about your heart rate, temperature, muscle contractions or brain waves? A new flexible electronic circuit promises to do just that, by moving with the skin and staying in place without any adhesive. The research used existing semiconductor technology to imprint integrated circuits onto a thin, flexible silicon film that can be applied directly on the skin....

The elderly—especially the very old—are the fastest-growing group of cancer patients in the U.S., according to an article written by Claudia Wallis in the December 2014 Scientific American. Determining which older patients can benefit from chemotherapy—and which ones lack the resilience to tolerate it—have therefore become increasingly urgent issues. Arti Hurria of the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, Calif., and colleagues have devised and tested a tool for determining chemotherapy tolerance in older patients....

The drought that has kept much of the nation in its grip this summer brings a host of additional downstream worries for growers already struggling with reduced yields. Cattle are being poisoned by cyanide-laced weeds in Arkansas. Across the Midwest water-soluble fertilizers are concentrating in soils and plants, making them harmful rather than productive. And in Missouri, samples suggest that more than half the corn crop isn’t fit for human consumption, thanks to unusually high levels of a carcinogenic toxin....

Six years ago I jumped at an opportunity to join the international team that was identifying the sequence of DNA bases, or “letters,” in the genome of the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). As a biostatistician with a long-standing interest in human origins, I was eager to line up the human DNA sequence next to that of our closest living relative and take stock. A humbling truth emerged: our DNA blueprints are nearly 99 percent identical to theirs....

In the world of self-driving cars, all eyes are on Google. But major automakers are making moves toward autonomous driving, too. Although their advanced-safety and driver-assistance features may seem incremental in comparison, many are proofs of concept for technologies that could one day control driverless cars. At the same time, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the arm of the Department of Transportation charged with establishing and enforcing car-safety standards and regulations, is studying and testing the road readiness of these control and machine-vision systems....

The universe is a mighty big place, but there is no shortage of amazement right here in our celestial neighborhood. From Venus’s searing surface temperatures, hot enough to melt lead, to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a storm that has been raging for hundreds of years, to the cryovolcanoes of the Saturnian moon Enceladus, the solar system boasts plenty of extreme locales. That is the thrust of a new book, The 50 Most Extreme Places in Our Solar System (Harvard University Press), which serves as a kind of photo-illustrated guidebook for the planets—along with their accompanying moons and rings—that surround the sun....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called Our Solar System (click the link to see a table of contents). Published earlier this year, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. “Where we know nothing we may speculate without fear of contradiction.” With these words, written in Scientific American in 1909, English astronomer F. W. Henkel, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, described without apparent embarrassment much of the culture of astronomy a century ago....

Microbes will be the (human) food- and fuel-makers of the future, if J. Craig Venter has his way. The man responsible for one of the original sequences of the human genome as well as the team that brought you the first living cell running on human-made DNA now hopes to harness algae to make everything humanity needs. All it takes is a little genomic engineering. “Nothing new has to be invented....

Two years ago, the Carrefour Feuilles (pronounced “kar-ah-fur fay”) neighborhood was considered too dangerous for U.N. peacekeepers who were not protected by armored vehicles. And even today, a dozen or so Sri Lankan troops garrisoned here nervously stand watch behind heavy fortifications. But Carrefour Fueilles has turned out to be perfect for an experimental solid waste processing and recycling plant set up by people who live in the neighborhood. “We helped to create the conditions that made it possible for [U....

Roughly one fifth of older Americans suffer from adult-onset diabetes. This form of the disease, also known as type 2 diabetes, arises when insulin-producing cells in the pancreas fail to make enough of the hormone, or cells in the body become resistant to its influence, causing blood sugar levels to rise. This surge, in turn, can lead to potentially life threatening effects. The Western medicine chest currently holds no cure for type 2 diabetes, though treatments can preserve and prolong life....

Autistic children struggle with many obstacles, including learning to speak. And, experts have noted, if these children learn verbal skills by age five, they tend to become happier and higher-functioning adults than do their nonverbal peers. Thirty years ago, psychiatrists expected only half of all autistic children would gain speaking abilities. Recent studies, however, indicate that as many as 80 percent of children with autism can learn to talk. One such study in 2006 showed that toddlers who received intensive therapy aimed at developing foundational oral language skills made significant gains in their ability to communicate verbally....

A stunning photo went viral over the weekend, revealing a supertide that turned an 11th-century French abbey that is usually surrounded by sheep into an island swallowed by the sea. The image, from AP, is shown here. Similar photos from other news agencies also ran rampant on the Web. Thousands of people arrived on the coast of Normandy to watch the spectacular 14-meter-high surge of water envelop Mont Saint-Michel, the enclave around the abbey—usually accessible only by a causeway, which was overtopped by the tide....