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Does the language we speak determine how healthy and rich we will be? New research by Keith Chen of Yale Business School suggests so. The structure of languages affects our judgments and decisions about the future and this might have dramatic long-term consequences. There has been a lot of research into how we deal with the future. For example, the famous marshmallow studies of Walter Mischel and colleagues showed that being able to resist temptation is predictive of future success....

Researchers hope that a new kind of small portable microscope may give health workers the ability to quickly and cheaply scan blood for tumor cells and life-threatening parasites. What makes the microscope unique is the way it scans objects without lenses, and that it was inspired by a phenomenon that usually clouds vision instead of improving it. A team from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has demonstrated that light-sensitive microchips like those found in digital cameras can produce high-resolution images of microscopic beads and worms about a millimeter long....

People are notoriously bad at spotting lies: unless privy to information that directly contradicts a spurious story, past research suggests the average listener pinpoints a fib less than half the time. A study in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA now indicates that groups do a bit better at detecting dishonesty—but only when group members confer with one other before coming to a conclusion. University of Chicago business researcher Nicholas Epley and doctoral student Nadav Klein conducted four experiments to compare lie perception by individuals or groups....

Limiting global warming to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels would be a herculean task, involving rapid, dramatic changes in how governments, industries and societies function, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But even though the world has already warmed by 1 °C, humanity has 10–30 more years than scientists previously thought in which to kick its carbon habit. The world would have to curb its carbon emissions by at least 49% of 2017 levels by 2030 and then achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 to meet this target, according to a summary of the latest IPCC report, released on 8 October....

The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age By Gino Segre and Bettina Hoerlin. Henry Holt, 2016 Einstein’s Greatest Mistake: A Biography By David Bodanis. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 Virus: An Illustrated Guide to 101 Incredible Microbes By Marilyn J. Roossinck. Princeton University Press, 2016 Where Song Began: Australia’s Birds and How They Changed the World By Tim Low. Yale University Press, 2016 Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging the Two Cultures By Eric R....

The National Institutes of Health wants to fund up to $20 million worth of research into alternatives to using human fetal tissue to study disease, the agency announced Monday. The announcement is largely preliminary. The formal funding opportunity announcements will be published at some date in the future, the agency said, and scientists cannot yet submit proposals to be funded. The total amount of money available has not been determined, according to the announcement, but the agency is “interested” in investing $20 million over the course of two years....

Pacifiers aren’t just for soothing colicky babies anymore. A new study has found that use of a pacifier during sleep reduced the chances of a baby suffering from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) by 90 percent. Furthermore, pacifiers eliminated the increased risk associated with babies who slept on their stomach or in soft bedding–factors that have been shown to increase the risk of SIDS as much as 10-fold. “A baby who sleeps on his stomach without a pacifier has a 2....

Computers that exploit the weird properties of quantum mechanics could have capabilities far exceeding those of conventional computers for certain problems, such as breaking a widely used type of encryption. Yet physicists must overcome a fundamental obstacle before quantum computers can become a practical reality: decoherence, which is the loss of the very quantum properties that such computers would rely on. Decoherence stems from the tiniest stray interactions with the ambient environment, and thus most quantum computer designs seek to isolate the sensitive working elements from their surroundings....

Within a few decades even the coldest years will be warm by historical standards. After 2047, the mean air temperature worldwide will exceed even the highest annual temperature from 1860 to 2005 if countries continue to emit carbon dioxide at the rates they do now. That “new abnormal” will begin even sooner than 2047 in certain locations, with the earliest occurrences (dark red) being across the tropics. That is precisely where species are least able to adapt to even small variations “because they are so used to a constant climate,” says Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who led the study....

Boosting household energy access has a minimal direct impact on climate change, according to a new paper that argues ending poverty should be the top short-term priority for poor countries. The study published in the journal Nature Climate Change is among the first empirical studies to measure how a vast improvement in electrification—in this case, in India—contributed to greenhouse gas emissions levels. The findings could create a snarl in the efforts of environmental groups who say renewable energy should be the key, if not only, tool to bringing modern electricity services to the 1....

For years scientists have studied the biological basis of human speed, and reported that the fastest athletes are short and muscular in build. However, these conclusions were challenged in 2008 when a new athlete, substantially taller than previous world-record holders, was identified as the fastest man in history. Usain Bolt presented the purest expression of human speed on the planet – and raised the possibility that scientists may need to entirely change the way they think about human biometrics....

In my Scientific American column this month I explained why touch-screen desktop computers are annoyingly hard to use. (It has something to do with so-called “gorilla arm.”) But leaving aside those problems, Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system might confuse longtime PC fans, at least at first. That’s because it feels like two different operating systems—one for mouse-and-keyboard PCs (the traditional Windows desktop) and one for touch screens (a new mosaic of bright, colorful tiles)....

Ancient cooks living in what is now the valley of Oaxaca in Mexico could have taught even Bobby Flay a thing or two, it seems. Dried out remains of chili peppers from two Oaxacan caves reveal that people of the region used at least 10 different varieties of fresh and dried chilies between 500 and 1,500 years ago. “If you’ve got seven different kinds of peppers, if you’re using them fresh and you’re using them dried, you’ve got some interesting food,” says archaeobotanist Linda Perry of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D....

When most large whales—such as blue, minke and humpback whales—chow down, they don’t chew their food with teeth. Instead they employ hundreds of baleen plates that hang from their upper jaw like prickly curtains to filter minuscule prey from the ocean. First the whales gulp vast amounts of seawater into their massive maw. Then, like an enormous juice press, they close their jaws and squeeze the water out through the baleen....

As the mindfulness joke goes, what do we want? Mindfulness! When do we want it? Now! Mindfulness, indeed, is designed to keep us in the now. But there is frequent confusion about how exactly that occurs, and what mindfulness feels like. So let’s start with four things that mindfulness often gets mistaken for: Mindfulness Impostor #1: An empty mind. Your mind is designed to think, notice, concentrate—anything but be empty. Don’t ask of your mind what it isn’t designed to do....

As glaciers melt and island populations retreat from their coastlines to escape rising seas, many scientists remain baffled as to why the global research consensus on human-induced climate change remains contentious in the U.S. The frustration revealed itself during a handful of sessions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., this past weekend, coming to a peak during a Friday session, “Science without Borders and Media Unbounded”....

When something frightens grazing deer, they all suddenly bound away together in an apparently organized fashion. How does a stressed-out, possibly panicked group of animals manage to coordinate such a getaway without crashing into one another? In an effort to find out, biologist Hynek Burda of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague and his team turned to roe deer, European ungulates that often graze in open fields. As a favorite of hunters, the deer associate humans with danger and run away when approached....

Kaitlyn Romoser first caught covid-19 in March, likely on a trip to Denmark and Sweden, just as the scope of the pandemic was becoming clear. Romoser, who is 23 and a laboratory researcher in College Station, Texas, tested positive and had a few days of mild, coldlike symptoms. In the weeks that followed, she bounced back to what felt like a full recovery. She even got another test, which was negative, in order to join a study as one of the earliest donors of convalescent blood plasma in a bid to help others....

A new study may help answer one of the universe’s biggest mysteries: Why is there more matter than antimatter? That answer, in turn, could explain why everything from atoms to black holes exists. Billions of years ago, soon after the Big Bang, cosmic inflation stretched the tiny seed of our universe and transformed energy into matter. Physicists think inflation initially created the same amount of matter and antimatter, which annihilate each other on contact....

Our recollection of events is usually not like a replay of digital video from a security camera—a passive observation that faithfully reconstructs the spatial and sensory details of everything that happened. More often memory segments what we experience into a string of discrete, connected events. For instance, you might remember that you went for a walk before lunch at a given time last week without recalling the soda bottle strewn on the sidewalk, the crow cawing in the oak tree in your yard or the chicken salad sandwich you ate upon your return....