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Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life J. Craig Venter Viking, 2013 ($26.95) Venter, the scientist famed for his role in sequencing the human genome, opens this remarkable book with his answer to a question that lies at the heart of biology: “What is life?” Life, he asserts, is wholly reducible to the “DNA machines” and “protein robots” that operate within cells, and he hopes to prove it by constructing organisms entirely from scratch....

The wind tosses Gaby Nava’s hair as the small fishing boat skims across the glassy water just off the port of Veracruz, Mexico. She smiles at the shallow bay and the Gulf of Mexico sprawling across the horizon. “We are very lucky today. Hardly any waves. Most of the time when we come out here it’s much more choppy,” the marine biologist shouts over the engine roar. “It’s better for Acropora palmata to be in moving waters....

TIANJIN ECO-CITY, China – Three years ago, this coastal area fit perfectly into the dictionary definition for “wasteland.” Its soil was too salty to grow crops. It was polluted enough to scare away potential residents. Sometimes the few fishermen who lived here saw investors driving in, but they quickly turned around and left, leaving nothing behind except dust. But then some people showed up to buy a piece of this land....

Perhaps someday you’ll need to go to the store because you ran out of cathode paint. A team of researchers has just announced a new paint-on battery design. The technique could change the way batteries are produced and eliminate restrictions on the surfaces used for energy storage. The paint-on battery, like all lithium ion batteries, consists of five layers: a positive current collector, a cathode that attracts positively charged ions, an ion-conducting separator, an anode to attract negative ions, and a negative current collector....

Quantum cryptography, which relies on the laws of physics to ensure that encoded messages can be deciphered only by those authorized to do so, has for years promised to deliver encryption far stronger than the public key infrastructures (PKI) more commonly used today. Trouble is, there are few, if any, documented uses of this quantum technology outside of lab settings. But this is about to change: On Sunday during Switzerland’s national elections officials in Geneva will use quantum cryptography to secure the network linking their ballot data entry center to the government repository where votes are stored....

More than 400 years ago Renaissance scientist Nicolaus Copernicus reduced us to near nothingness by showing that our planet is not the center of the solar system. With every subsequent scientific revolution, most other privileged positions in the universe humans might have held dear have been further degraded, revealing the cold truth that our species is the smallest of specks on a speck of a planet, cosmologically speaking. A new calculation of exoplanets suggests that Earth is just one out of a likely 700 million trillion terrestrial planets in the entire observable universe....

Emerging data on the new virus circulating in China adds to evidence there is sustained human-to-human transmission in the city of Wuhan, and that a single case was able to ignite a chain of other infections. The World Health Organization reported Thursday that there have been at least four generations of spread of the new virus, provisionally called 2019-nCoV, meaning a person who contracted the virus from a non-human source—presumably an animal—has infected a person, who infected another person, who then infected another person....

Some of my best moments at Paranal Observatory in Chile are at night when, after a day of work, I go up “on deck,” as we call the platform that hosts the four eight-meter-wide telescopes of the Very Large Telescope project (VLT). It is magical: the vast expanse of starry sky above, the smooth movements of the domes, the politically incorrect pleasure of smoking a pipe, the dark desert barely visible in its outline against the faintly opalescent horizon....

Elena Rios still remembers going into the bathroom as a child and smelling a pungent odor from the big, round air freshener hanging on the back of the toilet. “I’m Mexican-American, I grew up in Los Angeles, and I can tell you that particular product was in all the stores in the neighborhood, at low cost,” said Rios, a doctor who currently heads the National Hispanic Medical Association. Now a new study concludes that heavy use of these products could be jeopardizing the health of consumers, particularly Hispanics, across the country....

The people we associate with can have a powerful effect on our behavior—for better or for worse. This holds true for human health and body mass, too. The heavier our close friends and family, the heavier we are likely to be. This correlation, described in 2007 by a team that analyzed data from the longitudinal Framingham Heart Study, is well established. But just how this transpires—whether via shared norms, common behavior or just similar environments—has been the subject of much debate....

A newly discovered long and craggy rift is splintering across West Antarctica’s Pine Island Glacier, satellite images show. The nearly 19-mile-long (30 kilometers) rift started in the middle of the ice shelf, where the ice shelf touches warmer ocean waters that are melting it from underneath, said Stef Lhermitte, an assistant professor in the Department of Geoscience and Remote Sensing at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. The rift only has about another 6 miles (10 km) to go before one or more icebergs calf, breaking off from the glacier, Lhermitte said....

“BE PREPARED,” the Boy Scouts’ motto, is simple enough for children to remember. Why then can it be so difficult to plan for foreseeable disasters? Two November 2005 articles addressed that question: “Preparing for a Pandemic,” by W. Wayt Gibbs and Christine Soares, and “Preparing for the Worst” [SA Perspectives], which also discussed events such as Hurricane Katrina. Reader Colin Buss of Campbell River, B.C., observes, “If global health is at stake, the international community, including the U....

By Ed Yong of Nature magazineThe iconic Nile crocodile actually comprises two different species – and they are only distantly related. The large east African Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus) is in fact more closely related to four species of Caribbean crocodile than to its small west African neighbour, which has been named Crocodylus suchus.Evon Hekkala of Fordham University in New York and her colleagues revealed evidence for the existence of the second species by sequencing the genes of 123 living Nile crocodiles and 57 museum specimens, including several 2,000-year-old crocodile mummies....

Regular exercise may not help patients with severe high blood pressure as much as it does those with moderate hypertension. Yvonne Plantinga and her colleagues at the University of Pisa in Italy examined artery elasticity in 400 middle-aged volunteers. Stiffer arteries increase pressure on the heart. Regular exercise reduced stiffness in patients with normal or mildly high blood pressure but not in those with untreated, more severe conditions. “Medication and exercise would do better than just medication for those patients,” Plantinga suggested at the American Society of Hypertension conference in May....

In less optimistic and capable hands such a book might be little more than a grim catalogue of the devastating migrations, famines, wars, depressions and extinctions that would inevitably accompany the inundation of coastlines worldwide. These woes are mostly rearview considerations for Robinson, who instead marshals a wealth of evidence from economics, politics and science to explore the new normal that would gradually, inevitably emerge in a post-deluge world. The result is at once familiar yet alien....

I have been reading Scientific American since I was in high school. I am now 90 years old and a longtime subscriber. The February 2022 issue is one of the richest ever. I just handed it to my daughter, the mother of a 13-year-old, to read the articles on teaching kids to spot disinformation in media [“Schooled in Lies,” by Melinda Wenner Moyer] and on how people often (wrongly) jump to conclusions [“Leaps of Confusion,” by Carmen Sanchez and David Dunning]....

In “To Bennu and Back” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante S. Lauretta takes readers deep inside NASA’s sample-return mission to the asteroid Bennu. As detailed in this video, Bennu is a carbonaceous asteroid, an ancient relic from the solar system’s infancy that is filled with organic molecules. Other asteroids like Bennu may have seeded the early, prebiotic Earth with this material, contributing to the primordial soup from which life eventually emerged. By studying the sizable and pristine sample of material OSIRIS-REx is expected to bring back to Earth from Bennu, scientists hope to unlock deep secrets about the origins of the terrestrial planets and of life itself....

This is a special series of SA Forum essays produced with the World Economic Forum and to run during the Summit on the Global Agenda, held in Abu Dhabi from November 18 to November 20. We’ve all done it. You throw your clothes in a bag and head to the airport. Sixteen hours later, you’re in a country where the customs, dress, language and food are very different from home. As you leave the airport, you stop at an ATM, and within seconds have enough local currency for a taxi and a few meals....

Charles Darwin did not think of himself as a genius. “I have no great quickness of apprehension or wit which is so remarkable in some clever men …” he remarked in one passage of his autobiography. Fortunately for the rest of us, he was profoundly wrong in his assessment. So on February 12 the world will mark the bicentennial birthday of a scientist who holds a rightful place alongside Galileo, Copernicus, Newton and Einstein....

According to recent statistics, U.S. motorists have responded to record-high prices at the pump by driving less. Any hope that this cutback will significantly restrain global oil prices is misplaced, however: fundamental factors of supply and demand in the world economy will keep oil costly for years to come. The hope that a cutback in driving by U.S. motorists will significantly restrain global oil prices is misplaced. Although U.S. drivers are a major force in the world oil market—they account for around 14 million barrels per day (mbd) out of 85 mbd of worldwide demand—the growth in driving in China, India and other developing countries will easily outstrip any cutback in U....