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From his vantage point as chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force, Mark Maybury had a bird’s-eye view of myriad advantages and challenges that modern technology presents not only to the military but also to society as a whole. During a three-year tenure that ended in June when Maybury returned to military contractor Mitre Corp. as vice president and chief technology officer, he led a series of three studies to expand the military’s understanding of energy use and cybersecurity....

The human eye is an incredibly complex organ, and researchers continue to actively investigate how the eye functions and, in some cases, why it does not. An estimated 36 million people worldwide are blind, and an additional 217 million people have moderate to severe impairment of their vision. How many of these cases are avoidable? How can science help us reverse visual impairment and even blindness? Reversing Blindness with Gene Editing The most common genetic condition affecting vision is known as retinitis pigmentosa....

George Cotsarelis, a dermatologist and clinical specialist in hair and scalp disorders at the University of Pennsylvania, fields this query. Clipping hairs on the skin surface does not actually have any effect on the growth of hair, because the hair above the surface is technically dead. The hair visible on our bodies grows out of living hair follicles within the skin. These fairly complicated “miniorgans” are made up of more than 10 different cell types geared toward generating the hair fiber that reaches the surface of the skin....

The classic nightmare of suddenly realizing you’re naked in public could soon get a futuristic twist: it might involve the horror of losing not just your modesty but also your pass codes. Scientists recently created magnetic garments that they say can store data, automatically unlock doors or control a nearby smartphone with gestures. The concept of interactive “smart clothing” has drawn attention in the past couple of years. For example, Google and Levi’s created a touch-sensitive denim jacket that can operate a smartphone....

US researchers have drafted plans to study the faint afterglow of the Big Bang using a new facility. They hope it will be sensitive enough to confirm whether or not the infant Universe underwent a brief period of explosive expansion known as inflation. The Cosmic Microwave Background Stage-4 experiment (CMB-S4) would comprise three 6-metre and 14 half-metre telescopes distributed across two sites in Antarctica and Chile, according to a preliminary design due to be made public this week....

When Isaac Newton developed calculus and his theory of gravity, he reaped a reward far greater than stock options in a start-up or a big year-end bonus. He got credit for his work and recognition among his peers—and eventually the wider world. Since Newton, science has changed a great deal, but this basic fact has not. Credit for work done is still the currency of science. How should credit for scientific work be assigned?...

Have you already abandoned your New Year’s resolution? No need to feel ashamed. Fully a quarter of the people who make resolutions give up by the end of the first week, with many others falling off the wagon in the months to come. It seems to be human nature to aim high and fall short. Whether attempting to exercise more regularly, cut back on impulse buying or simply keep a tidy desk, anybody who has tried changing a long-standing habit knows how frustratingly hard lasting change can be....

The Advances section of Scientific American’s November issue took readers into the air with the world’s highest flying geese, back in time with an unlikely ancestor, into space to rendezvous with some garbage, to the Internet for a new way of conducting clinical trials, and beyond. For readers interested in learning more about the developments described in this section, a list of further background material follows: “On the Trail of Space Trash” The National Research Council’s report on space garbage is available on their Web site....

Two thousand years ago a storm drove a Roman ship against a sheer rock wall on the north side of the remote Greek island of Antikythera. The boat sank, along with tons of treasure: coins, gold jewelry, dozens of large marble and bronze statues, and an extraordinary, bronze clockwork device now counted as the first analog computer. The wreck lay at the sea bottom, 165 feet down, untouched until 1900, when one day sponge divers came upon it....

A new generation of medical devices using wireless communications, sophisticated software and data center-driven “cloud” computing promises to deliver health care in ways previously limited to the confines of fancy hospital rooms. These advances, ranging from edible sensors to cordless heart monitors to robotic arms that mirror a doctor’s movements, presage sharp falls in cost just as consumers clamor for more affordable health care. Around-the-clock tracking through wireless sensors, advanced biochemistry and raw remote computing power to mine and match symptom data with likely causes could help doctors band together to make faster, more correct diagnoses, from wherever they are....

This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. RIO GRANDE CITY, TEX.—When rains fall and creeks rise, residents of this small city in the state’s south know which streets to avoid as floodwaters race toward its namesake river just a few hundred feet downslope. Now, with a steel border fence as high as 30 feet slated to be built between the city and the Rio Grande—which in Texas doubles as the U....

Since buying Twitter, billionaire Elon Musk has tried to make the platform more engaging and profitable. He’s trying to shift the platform from an ad-driven model to a subscription-based one, and he’s fired half his staff. In his own words, the plan is to “do lots of dumb things [and] keep what works.” So far, this approach to revamping Twitter is causing chaos; many advertisers have pulled funding, and experts predict that changing the code so quickly while being short-staffed will break the site....

On a recent expedition into southeastern Georgia’s backwoods, after 137 hours of searching through blackwater ponds with nets, amphibian specialist Mark Mandica came away with two flatwoods salamander larvae, a federally endangered species. Although only a meager find, the larval pair was “unfortunately considered a huge success,” the executive director of the Amphibian Foundation laments. Flatwoods are extremely rare: Since 2000 populations have declined by 90 percent throughout their range in the U....

Smallpox, officially preserved in two repositories worldwide, may have been sitting alive and well in an unsecured US government refrigerator. On July 8, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in the refrigerator, located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. That refrigerator belongs to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which has conducted some of its research at the Bethesda site since 1972....

Another section of the vast Antarctic ice sheet is threatened by warm ocean waters, scientists reported yesterday. Researchers have watched as warm, deep currents have carved away at the underside of ice shelves on the western Antarctic coast, accelerating ice loss by eroding the floating ice tongues that help slow glaciers’ flow to the sea. Now a pair of new studies suggest that, by the end of the century, the same process could begin thawing a portion of the vast Antarctic ice sheet that researchers considered to be relatively stable....

There’s that old saying—the mind makes a wonderful servant but a terrible master. If you’re feeling insecure—about yourself, your relationship, or your life—these three thinking habits may be mastering your mind. Psychologists call these toxic habits cognitive distortions, which is just a technical way of saying “lies we tell ourselves.” But they’re tricky, because on the surface, they seem accurate, and more importantly, they feel accurate. And that’s the problem—cognitive distortions keep us feeling stupid, boring, inadequate, or otherwise insecure....

Scientific American presents Savvy Psychologist by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Having a baby is hard—they don’t call it ‘labor’ for nothing. And then? No rest for the weary. You’re suddenly and wholly responsible for this fragile, helpless being. Top that with some serious sleep deprivation, turbulent hormones, and the cultural expectations around bonding, bliss, and being “mom enough,” and you’ve got another kind of rude awakening on your hands—one not precipitated by middle-of-the-night feeding requests....

Every so often in the vast cosmos something exciting happens in one of the relatively few places that humans happen to watch closely. Like a rare bird touching down for a bath in the Trevi Fountain, such serendipitously placed exotica produces a wealth of witnesses and plenty of photographic documentation. So it was with a recent supernova in the spiral galaxy M51—better known to casual stargazers as the Whirlpool Galaxy, a photogenic swirl some 25 million light-years away....

August marks the anniversary of the current Ebola outbreak centered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). First declared on August 1, 2018, in the nation’s province of North-Kivu, it has sickened more than 2,500 people and killed close to 1,700—making it the second-worst outbreak after the one between 2014 and 2016 in West Africa, which sickened more than 28,000 people and killed more than 11,000. On July 17 the World Health Organization declared the latest outbreak a public health emergency of international concern—its highest level of alarm....

As 2019 draws to a close, prepare for endless roundups of the year’s most important news stories. But few of those stories may be remembered by 2039: new research shows the difficulty of predicting which events will make the history books. Philosopher Arthur Danto argued in 1965 that even the most informed person, an “ideal chronicler,” cannot judge a recent event’s ultimate significance because it depends on chain reactions that have not happened yet....