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The crash Friday of NASA’s Glory satellite couldn’t have come at a worse time. The incident is a blow for climate science and the space agency’s efforts to rebuild an Earth observation program weakened by years of lean budgets. It also comes during a protracted spending fight on Capitol Hill in which science agencies have become prime targets for House Republicans’ budget ax. According to NASA, problems with Glory’s launch vehicle, a Taurus XL rocket, sent the climate probe crashing into the Pacific Ocean early Friday morning....

French researchers have resurrected a retrovirus that became trapped in the human genome about five million years ago. Pieced together from existing sequences in human DNA, the reconstructed virus was able to infect mammalian cells weakly, suggesting that it works similarly to the extinct organism. Retroviruses insert their DNA into a host genome in order to reproduce, but if they stick around long enough they might undergo a mutation that keeps them from popping back out....

Weeks before the harvest started last summer, Li Ping’s rice paddies were hit by extreme weather. Temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit baked Longtan village in north China for over a month, causing leaf yellowing and damaging grain production. As a result, Li’s rice yields decreased by 20 percent compared with normal years. But Li did not struggle to raise money for his next planting, which he did after previous crop failures....

Once a raging tropical cyclone, the remnants of Hurricane Larry have transformed into a howling winter storm. After pummeling the coast of Newfoundland last week, and then careening east across the northern Atlantic, Larry brushed past the southeastern coast of Greenland during the last few days—a rare feat for a former Atlantic hurricane. The storm dumped blankets of snow and raised strong winds as it blew past the Arctic island. The Danish Meteorological Institute reported gusts of over 90 mph at some weather stations....

EMOTIONAL PROTECTION? “Banking against Alzheimer’s,” by David A. Bennett, provides a fascinating perspective, showing that the etiology of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia in general is very complex, much like depression and schizophrenia. I wonder if researchers should investigate protective factors beyond the cognitive, such as aspects of emotion, which are increasingly recognized as part of the integrated function of the brain. Larger social networks, finding meaningful purpose in life, musical inclination and the motivation to start learning a second language may all be summed up as evidence of a positive emotional drive....

People are living longer than ever. According to a 2015 World Health Organization report, Japanese live the longest, with an average life expectancy of 84, while Americans can expect to live to 77. At the same time, it is an obvious fact that some people live much longer than other people. There is inequality in mortality. What explains this inequality? Epidemiological research confirms what intuition suggests: lifestyle matters. A 2012 study published in Preventive Medicine followed over 8,000 people over a 5-year period....

Editor’s Note (1/18/23): Moderna announced this week that its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine is 84 percent effective at preventing lower respiratory disease in older adults. Scientific American answered common questions about the virus, its treatments and previously tested vaccines in this story from last November. As flu season picks up and experts weigh concerns about another possible COVID surge, children’s hospitals are already filling with patients with another viral threat: respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV....

Scientists do not have a window into your thoughts yet, but they can now shine beams of light into your head and watch information flow around your brain. Gabriele Gratton and Monica Fabiani, neuroscientists at the University of Illinois, are pioneering the new technique based on the way brain tissue transmits light. A test subject wears a helmet that allows Gratton and Fabiani to apply intense near-infrared illumination to the skull using fiber-optic cables....

Elon Musk’s company successfully launched a satellite to orbit today (June 23) using a pre-flown Falcon 9 booster, pulling off the feat for the second time in less than three months. The action began at 3:10 p.m. EDT (1810 GMT), when the Falcon 9 blasted off from historic Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with the BulgariaSat-1 communications satellite on board. About 2.5 minutes into the flight, the rocket’s two stages separated, and the first stage began maneuvering its way back to Earth....

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the March 2004 issue of Scientific American. In early November 2000 the Big Island of Hawaii experienced its largest earthquake in more than a decade. Some 2,000 cubic kilometers of the southern slope of Kilauea volcano lurched toward the ocean, releasing the energy of a magnitude 5.7 shock. Part of that motion took place under an area where thousands of people stop every day to catch a glimpse of one of the island’s most spectacular lava flows....

The earth’s oceans hold enough uranium to power all the world’s major cities for thousands of years—if we can extract it. A project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy is making notable advances in this quest: scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a material that can effectively pull uranium out of seawater. The material builds on work by researchers in Japan and consists of braided polyethylene fibers coated with the chemical amidoxime....

Harold Brooks, head of the Mesoscale Applications Group at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., explains. The central part of the U.S. gets many tornadoes, particularly strong and violent ones, because of the unique geography of North America. The combination of the Gulf of Mexico to the south and the Rocky Mountains to the west provides ideal environmental conditions for the development of tornadoes more often there than any other place on earth....

Failing to act quickly on climate change could dramatically increase the cost of stemming carbon emissions, the White House warns in a report today that tests a new political message about “climate insurance.” The economic impact of reducing emissions will rise 40 percent for each decade that the United States delays in establishing an aggressive climate plan, according to the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, which prepared the 33-page report. One reason is because increasingly stringent policies could be needed to cut growing carbon output over a shorter period of time....

We all know that the cycle of electronics consumerism is broken. Because it’s an endless money drain for consumers to keep their gadgets current. Because the never ending desire to show off new features leads to bloat and complexity of design. And because all our outdated, abandoned gadgets have to go somewhere. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, we Americans threw away 310 million electronic gadgets in 2010 alone. That’s about 1....

Scientists and engineers dream about big advances that could change the world, and then they try to create them. On the following pages, Scientific American reveals 10 innovations that could be game changers: an artificial alternative to DNA, oil that cleans water, pacemakers powered by our blood, and more. These are not pie-in-the-sky notions but practical breakthroughs that have been proved or prototyped and are poised to scale up greatly. Each has the potential to make what may now seem impossible possible....

By Declan Butler of Nature magazineHealth ministers from the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) 193 member states will next week debate when to destroy the two last known remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox, a scourge that was eradicated in 1980.Many scientists argue, however, that the variola stocks should be maintained, perhaps indefinitely. The stocks are helping the development of new countermeasures such as drugs, vaccines and diagnostics in case smallpox should reappear, and may also allow researchers to explore the impact of smallpox on the human immune system, providing insights into other diseases such as AIDS....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

For years physicists have been refining invisibility cloaks—physical setups that cleverly reroute light around a region in space, effectively concealing any object that might be inside. Now researchers at Cornell University have built the first temporal cloak, a device that obscures an object or event at a specific moment in time. In a preliminary demonstration Cornell postdoctoral researcher Moti Fridman and his colleagues shone a laser beam through an experimental apparatus and into a detector....

In 2011, Jeremy Rifkin, an American economic and political theorist, published The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World. This book explains that a successful and sustainable economic paradigm shift requires a communication tool, energy sources and modes of transportation. Rifkin has been an advisor to many nations in the European Union, but Luxembourg is the first to adopt his strategy as a whole country....

A portrait of John James Audubon shows the artist and naturalist in a dark wolf-skin cloak, cradling a gun and sporting curly dark hair that was likely smoothed back with bear grease. The picture was painted during Audubon’s 1826 trip to England and Scotland, when he was playing up his role as the American woodsman to raise money for his opus, The Birds of America. Once completed, the collection included 435 prints of birds flying, eating, perching and fighting....