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Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself by Jamie A. Davies Oxford University Press, 2014 Children are not the only ones who wonder where babies come from. Scientists, too, are still trying to answer this question on its most basic levels. Human bodies, after all, are not built like bridges by external engineers—they build themselves. University of Edinburgh biologist Davies describes what we know and what we do not know about how tiny individual components come together to create the complexity of life, laying out the major insights that have been gleaned over the past decade....

By Sharon Bernstein PHILLIPS, Calif. (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown, acting in the face of a devastating multiyear drought, ordered the first statewide mandatory water restrictions on Wednesday, directing cities and communities to reduce usage by 25 percent. The cutbacks, to be implemented by state and local water agencies, will affect consumers and businesses throughout the most populous U.S. state, but farmers, who are already making do with less water for irrigation, will be exempt....

The launching and landing of space shuttles has always been a fairly coastal affair: The shuttles take off from Florida and almost always touch down in Florida or California. (Once, in 1982, a shuttle landed at New Mexico’s White Sands Space Harbor.) NASA is continuing that coastal tradition with the placement of its retired and retiring shuttles, whose final homes were announced April 12. The three shuttles will be displayed in Florida, Los Angeles and Virginia, and a test-flight shuttle that never reached orbit will go to New York City....

In 2014, a vibrant and well-traveled patient I will call Alice, whom I (Berman) was treating for bipolar disorder, began refusing to leave her home after a prolonged course of physical rehabilitation for a spinal injury. None of the usual diagnoses—depression, anxiety or agoraphobia—explained her withdrawal, which continued after medications stabilized her mood. Patients with these conditions typically maintain a desire to be with others, but Alice had shut out the world....

India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh has approved a US$19 billion plan to make the country a global leader in solar energy over the next three decades. The ambitious project would see a massive expansion in installed solar capacity, and aims to reduce the price of electricity generated from solar energy to match that from fossil fuels by 2030.The ‘solar mission’ was first mooted as part of India’s national action plan on climate change, announced in June 2008....

Daniel Tammet is author of two books, Born on a Blue Day and Embracing the Wide Sky, the latter of which came out in January. He is also a linguist and holds the European record for reciting the first 22,514 digits of the mathematical constant pi. Scientific American Mind contributing editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Tammet about the way his memory works, why the IQ test is overrated, and a possible explanation for extraordinary feats of creativity....

Peidong Yang, a chemist who is building nanowires into commercial applications—such as devices that generate fuel from solar energy, or convert waste heat into electricity—is one of nine US scientists and social scientists to win a so-called ‘genius grant’ this year from the philanthropic MacArthur Foundation, based in Chicago, Illinois. The awards, announced on September 29, give $625,000 of “no-strings-attached” funding to creative and inspiring individuals in any field, paid out over five years....

Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, estimate that, as a result of gender bias, papers whose first authors are women receive around 10% fewer citations than do those that are first-authored by men. Gender disparities in citation patterns have been documented across science before. But researchers have not previously tried to quantify how much of the differences are the result of gender bias. For instance, men and women may publish different types of papers; women may work in different scientific fields, and may hold less-senior positions....

Before Dr. Lars Lööf writes a prescription for his patients, he checks a new database—but it’s not just to search for the typical warnings about a drug. He wants to know whether the medication might harm the environment. In some cases, he even can find a more environmentally friendly drug, all with a click of his mouse. The new database, available to physicians in Sweden, is the first of its kind in the world, prompted by a broader law in Europe that transforms the way pharmaceuticals are evaluated before going to market....

TRAWLING REVOLUTIONIZED FISHING. For millennia, humans had been catching fish by net, trap, spear, and hook. The first bottom trawls were 20-foot nets weighted by stones and lead in the closed “cod” end. The front end of the net was held open by a wooden or steel beam. Pulled by a sailboat going with the wind and tide, the trawl raked the seafloor and scared flatfishes like flounder, halibut, and sole into the net....

When scientists study how we think, they usually design their experiments to control as many variables as possible. Though essential for careful science, these expensive measures restrict research in many ways: most psychology studies are conducted on small groups of Western undergraduates over short periods. Most scientists agree we could learn more from longer studies of larger, more diverse populations, but until recently acquiring such data proved nearly impossible. Now the vast data sets of an online brain-training company, Lumos Labs, are offering insights that have been out of reach for traditional laboratories....

Pregnant women have historically been excluded from the majority of medical research under the justification of protecting these women and their pregnancies from harm. But when new treatments are not tested in this population, we cannot know whether those treatments are safe and effective. People who are sick or have chronic conditions can become pregnant, and those who are pregnant can get sick or develop health conditions. More than 90 percent of women take at least one medicine during pregnancy, and a significant portion are given recommended vaccines: the flu shot and Tdap, both of which protect not only the recipient but their family as well....

MUSEUMS/EXHIBITIONS (1) Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns & Mermaids Why do so many different cultures include dragons in their mythology? Anthropology, archaeology and art history meet in this new exhibit designed to explore the roots of belief in fantastical creatures. Art, cultural artifacts, fossils and animal relics are displayed side by side, illustrating how, for example, narwhal tusks fueled a unicorn craze in medieval Europe. Learn how human imagination (and misinterpretation) has created stories of impossible beasts, many of which have become central myths in cultures around the world....

Harvard University paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who died in 2002, was a tough-minded skeptic who did not suffer fools gladly when it came to pseudoscience and superstition. Gould was a secular Jew who did not believe in God, but he had a soft spot for religion, expressed most famously in his principle of NOMA—nonoverlapping magisteria. The magisterium (domain of authority) of science “covers the empirical realm: what is the universe made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory),” he wrote in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life....

To negotiate floods and cross streams, fire ants band together — literally — linking together to form rafts and bridges in a feat of social cooperation and biophysics. Now, engineers have made a close study of the ants’ architectural technique, pointing the way towards new approaches for robot designers and materials scientists. To understand the properties of the ant structures, David Hu, a mechanical engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, sought to observe not just the surface of the ant clumps but the structure and joints underneath....

When Daniel Weaver pitches Genformatic to potential investors, he feels obliged to note a future legal uncertainty. The two-year-old company, based in Austin, Texas, offers whole-genome sequencing and analysis to researchers and physicians, with plans to apply the technology to medical diagnostics. But Weaver fears that the company could become ensnared in a thicket of thousands of patents. “Who knows how much it would cost in legal fees just to sort through that?...

Although billions of kilometers from the sun, frigid Pluto has an Earthly air: an atmosphere made mostly of nitrogen, the same gas that constitutes 78 percent of the air we breathe. But Pluto pursues such an elliptical orbit around the sun that all of that gas might freeze onto its surface when farthest and coldest. On May 4, however, Pluto passed in front of a star in the constellation Sagittarius, allowing observers to watch the atmosphere block some of the star’s light and deduce that the air is so substantial it never disappears....

Launching weather balloons has been a nearly daily habit at some Antarctic research facilities since 1957. Carrying radiosondes–instruments that measure atmospheric conditions such as temperature and wind speed–the balloons travel as high as 12 miles or more. A new analysis of the past 30 years of records from nine research stations, including Amundsen-Scott at the South Pole, reveals that the air above the entirety of Antarctica has warmed by as much as 0....

Not one but two gigantic black holes lurk at the heart of the distant spiral galaxy NGC 7674, a new study suggests. These two supermassive black holes are separated by less than 1 light-year and together harbor about 40 million times the mass of the sun, researchers said. If it holds up, the find would be just the second known system of double supermassive black holes. The other, announced in 2006, is in a galaxy known as 0402+379, whose two giant black holes are separated by about 24 light-years and boast a combined 15 billion solar masses....

Wiping out drinking-associated memories could help those with alcohol problems to stay sober, suggests a study in rats. As with other forms of addiction, environmental cues linked to drinking — such as the smell of beer — can trigger the urge to consume alcohol and increase the risk of a relapse into abuse. Over time, these learned associations can be maddeningly difficult to break. Scientists have now identified a potential molecular target in the brains of rats that could one day lead to treatments to help people stay dry....