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It’s 2014, which means that Facebook will be 10 years old this February. Since the site launched it has become standard procedure for companies to screen job candidates based on their social media profiles. A recent study, however, suggests that the practice may actually drive away qualified applicants who feel that their privacy has been compromised. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that when job applicants realize an organization has viewed their social media profile, they are less likely to perceive the hiring process as fair, regardless of whether they were offered the position....

The most game-changing wearable device on the market right now may not be a fitness tracker or a smartwatch: It’s a hearing aid. Unlike fitness trackers, which are often tucked away in a drawer in just a few months, hearing aids are changing the way that people with hearing impairments live in the digital age, researchers say. Small, discreet and often Bluetooth-enabled, the new generation of hearing aids look more like something out of a spy movie than a doctor’s office....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineA hint of the Higgs boson, the missing piece in the standard model of particle physics, has been found in data collected by the Tevatron, the now-shuttered U.S. particle collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill.While not statistically significant, the indications announced on March 7 at the Moriond conference in La Thuile, Italy, are consistent with 2011 reports of a possible standard model Higgs particle with a mass of around 125 GeV from experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland....

In my Scientific American column this month, I opined that email never really has been a secure communications channel—and that, in the age of suspected Russian hacking, Wikileaks, and countless other high-profile hacks, it never will be. But suppose you want to communicate securely. What are your options? Here’s a quick look at some of the ways you can carry on encrypted conversations, without worrying that your words could be captured and used against you someday....

Early mammals conjure up images of rat- or shrew-size creatures that skulked in the shadows of dinosaurs, trying to avoid being ripped limb from limb by the terrible lizards. Now it seems that the hunted sometimes became the hunter. Newfound fossils reveal a baby dinosaur inside a mammal’s gut–the first direct evidence of such predation. An international team based its conclusions on a species called Repenomamus robustus, a mammal about as big as a Virginia opossum that lived during the Mesozoic, 130 million or so years ago....

Are natural gas wells in northeastern Pennsylvania contaminating the groundwater supply? Some researchers think so. Scientists at Duke University detected elevated levels of methane, ethane and propane in groundwater samples near active fracking sites. The scientists conclude that the gasses come from the wells, not natural sources, but that the problem could be solved with better-designed casings. “We think there’s a well-integrity problem in this part of the Marcellus,” says Robert Jackson, a professor at Duke and lead author on the paper describing the findings....

In the past month, congressional Republicans have subpoenaed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to gain access to the private documents and emails of scientists involved in a landmark climate change study to look for evidence of alleged wrongdoing. The attempts, by Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, timed before COP-21 talks in Paris next month to negotiate a new global climate change agreement, have prompted some comparisons to Climategate....

The elusive octopus genome has finally been untangled, which should allow scientists to discover answers to long-mysterious questions about the animal’s alienlike physiology: How does it camouflage itself so expertly? How does it control—and regenerate—those eight flexible arms and thousands of suckers? And, most vexing: How did a relative of the snail get to be so incredibly smart—able to learn quickly, solve puzzles and even use tools? The findings, published today in Nature, reveal a vast, unexplored landscape full of novel genes, unlikely rearrangements—and some evolutionary solutions that look remarkably similar to those found in humans....

Although it would not get you past a brick wall and onto Platform 9¾ to catch the Hogwarts Express, quantum tunneling—in which a particle “tunnels” through a seemingly insurmountable barrier—remains a confounding, intuition-defying phenomenon. Now Toronto-based experimental physicists using rubidium atoms to study this effect have measured, for the first time, just how long these atoms spend in transit through a barrier. Their findings appeared in Nature on July 22. The researchers have showed that quantum tunneling is not instantaneous—at least, in one way of thinking about the phenomenon—despite recent headlines that have suggested otherwise....

Increased precipitation resulting partially from climate change has caused an additional $2.5 billion a year in U.S. flood damage, according to a new study that pinpoints the effect of changing weather on the cost of natural disasters. A study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal says that from 1988 through 2017, intensifying precipitation was responsible for a total of $75 billion in U.S. flood damage over the 29-year study period....

When we consider the state of wildlife on the planet, the general consensus is that humanity hasn’t had the best track record with species extinctions. Over the past 500 years, approximately 500 land-based species have gone extinct because of human actions, but compare that with the ocean and things look much better—scientists have only counted 15 extinctions under the sea. A new paper published in the journal Science examines the past, present and future of marine wildlife and asserts that ocean animal populations are as healthy as their land kin were hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago, before major ecological damage took place....

In today’s competitive global economy where corporate success hinges on productivity and innovation, many companies are toying with alternative means for motivating employees. From onsite pool tables and ball pits to free haircuts and subsidized massages, employers are thinking outside the box in an effort to get workers to do the same. My suggestion for improving employee morale and productivity is far simpler and less costly: Cancel all meetings. As Americans collectively spend time in an estimated 11 million meetings each day, I’m guessing there are a few other people out there who might agree with me....

SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - The Texas Gulf Coast was bracing for Tropical Storm Harvey to make landfall by Friday, bringing with it powerful winds, torrential rains and the possibility that it could strengthen into a hurricane. Harvey was about 370 miles (595 km) southeast of Port Mansfield, Texas, by early Thursday as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico with maximum sustained winds of 45 miles (72 km) per hour, the U....

LONG BEACH, Calif. – On a sunny afternoon, more than 1,000 children poured out of Hudson K-8 School, eager to play in their neighborhood. The flag football team was gearing up for practice, working out with their coach on the school’s grassy field. Just beyond the playground fence, a line of diesel trucks was idling, stuck in traffic as they made their way from a massive port complex to a congested freeway....

From Nature magazine After 13 suspenseful years, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a pill that could help to fight the US obesity epidemic. Belviq (lorcaserin) is no wonder drug, but it can help people to lose about 3–4% of their body weight when combined with a healthy diet and exercise. The drug has been approved for use by obese people with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 30, and for a subset of overweight people (with a BMI of more than 27) who have health conditions such as high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol and type 2 diabetes....

In December the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) will announce the latest results from the tests it administers every three years to hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds around the world. In the last round, the U.S. posted average scores in reading and science but performed well below other developed nations in math, ranking 36 out of 65 countries. We do not expect this year’s results to be much different. Our nation’s scores have been consistently lackluster....

The Science Of The Next 150 Years: 50 Years in the Future As we look back from the perspective of NDDD—Nuclear Disarmament Decision Day on August 8, 2063—it is still not clear how the first “small” nuclear war started in 2024. Yet it is clear that once it happened, things changed. The survivors saw that nuclear war was no longer a fantasy; nuclear extinction the next time was no longer an impossibility....

Online associate editor David Biello arrived in China this past May with the intention of reporting for Scientific American’s Web site on the country’s daunting environmental and health challenges. Those subjects suddenly redefined themselves on the afternoon of May 12, however, when a massive magnitude 7.9 Wenchuan earthquake tore apart Mianyang, Chengdu and other communities in the western province of Sichuan. Nearly 70,000 people were killed, and millions were abruptly left homeless....

We knew coral bleaching was a serious issue in the Great Barrier Reef, but the scope of just how widespread it was has been unclear—until now. Extensive aerial surveys and dives have revealed that 93 percent of the world’s largest reef has been devastated by coral bleaching. The culprit has been record-warm water driven by El Niño and climate change that has cooked the life out of corals. The unprecedented destruction brought leading reef scientist Terry Hughes, who runs the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, to tears....

Mantis shrimp hold the title for the fastest punch in the animal kingdom—powerful enough to break seashells and aquarium glass. They also boast some of the world’s most complex, extraordinary eyes. Human eyes have three kinds of light receptor cells, but these shrimp have a dozen, allowing them to sense properties of light invisible to other animals. Engineers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have now made a camera that closely copies the crustacean’s impressive visual system....