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You’ve met the cluck-cluckers—the people who automatically decry every new technology. “All this newfangled gadgetry is rotting our brains,” they say, “and ruining our kids.” Every older generation disapproves of the next; that’s predictable and human. Apparently digital devices are ruining our youth, just the way that rock music ruined their parents, and television ruined their parents and motorcars ruined theirs. So I guess we’ve been ruined for generations. But I got to wondering: What does science say about the ruinous effects of the latest technology?...

From Nature magazine The growth pattern of long-range connections in the brain predicts how a child’s reading skills will develop, according to research published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Literacy requires the integration of activity in brain areas involved in vision, hearing and language. These areas are distributed throughout the brain, so efficient communication between them is essential for proficient reading. Jason Yeatman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California, and his colleagues studied how the development of reading ability relates to growth in the brain’s white-matter tracts, the bundles of nerve fibres that connect distant regions of the brain....

You raise one of the most intriguing questions in modern resilience science: Can adversity be good for development? The answer appears to be yes, depending on the timing and nature of the stresses. But it is important to note that it is a person’s adaptive responses to life’s challenges that are beneficial, not the exposure to adversity itself. Beneficial responses have been called steeling effects, stress inoculation and post-traumatic growth. Extreme deprivation or stress can clearly cause lasting life consequences....

The buzz out of Beijing is that China’s Tiangong 1 space lab may fly sooner than expected, perhaps soaring into space by this month’s end. That might be the case, according to China space watcher Gregory Kulacki, a senior analyst and China Project manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The Tiangong 1 module (“Heavenly Palace 1” in Chinese) is not China’s actual space station—nor will it be a part of the planned Chinese space station, he said....

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is undergoing the most severe bleaching event in its history, as corals along the reef expel the symbiotic algae that provide them both with their rich colours and food. Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, is one of a team making aerial surveys of the reef to assess the extent of the bleaching....

Critics say the Army Corps of Engineers never saw a flood control project it didn’t like. The agency is swinging for the fences again in 2019 with the rollout of what could be the most expensive public works project in the agency’s history. What began as a $10 billion flood wall proposal to protect Galveston Island and the Houston Ship Channel ballooned to between $23 billion and $32 billion. The project, spurred by the devastation of Hurricane Ike in 2008, also got a new name to match its rising price tag....

From Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide and the Secret to Saving the World, by Kevin Bales. Copyright © 2016, by Kevin Bales. Reprinted by arrangement with Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. There are thousands of children enslaved on Dublar Char and other islands in Sundarbans as well as the wider Bay of Bengal. Some process fish, others work the shrimp farms or process shrimp in makeshift factories....

To completely understand how a living organism works one would have to take it apart, the great physicist Niels Bohr once observed—but then the organism would certainly be dead. In general, systems of high complexity, including living things but ranging from the Internet to social networks, are often impossible to track in all their details. But what if you didn’t have to? Network-theory researchers now have come up with some clever mathematics that reveals complex systems by tracking a selected few of their components....

Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told matter and energy. Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient. The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell’s nucleus....

Since its founding in August 1845, 171 years ago, Scientific American has been a magazine with an obsession: how the process of scientific research and innovation not only fosters discoveries but also helps human society shape our own destiny. In that first issue, for instance, the editors promised to be the “advocate of industry and enterprise.” They reported on the latest in transportation (an illustration of an aerodynamically improved railway car decorated the cover), communication (the editors praised Samuel Morse’s telegraph as a “wonder of the age”) and many patents aimed at easing human labors....

Caterpillars transform into butterflies and moths via a radical process known as metamorphosis, where their bodies virtually turn to soup and develop anew. Since Darwin, biologists have believed that the larval and the adult forms of insects evolved from a common ancestor. Indeed, the evolution of metamorphosis is thought to have fueled the incredible diversity of insects today, allowing them to exploit different habitats at different life stages. Now, a lone scientist claims that the phenomenon arose when two very different creatures accidentally mated....

A new tool will soon let researchers analyze Earth’s surface in mesmerizing detail, from the state of the planet’s soil to the plants that bloom on its surface to the makeup of urban sprawl. This spring a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Florida to deliver Germany’s €300-million Environmental Mapping and Analysis Program (EnMAP) satellite into orbit. Starting in the fall, remote sensing researchers around the world can apply to set the spacecraft’s sights on specific targets as it orbits the globe from pole to pole....

MOON GAZING In “Alien Moons,” Rebecca Boyle describes several techniques for detecting moons around exoplanets. While such findings to date are rare, there is another method that she failed to mention: gravitational microlensing. This approach is of value in dense star fields when a star is transited by a planet whose moon happens to be in the plane of the planet’s orbit and alongside it at that time. David Shander Denver BOYLE REPLIES: Gravitational microlensing is an interesting technique, but it comes with a significant downside, which is that scientists usually have only one chance to use it....

Collaboration has almost become a dirty word in America, tending more toward a definition of “traitorous cooperation with an enemy” and away from “working with others to create something.” This saddens me, as it should you. We need to find common ground to work together and to share—at all levels. Although election angst is on many of our minds, I am not pointing simply at our politicians here, but to people in all walks of life, and to my fellow scientists in particular....

A precision analysis of gases from Earth’s mantle collected at a geologic formation in the U.S. Southwest points to a source for the gas that more closely resembles carbonaceous meteorites than it does the sun. If confirmed by further research, the new study would challenge a theoretical model for atmosphere formation in which Earth began with two reservoirs of solar gas captured during the planet’s formation and youth—one surrounding the planet, the other buried beneath the surface....

Behind every successful forward-looking decision stands a good prediction. When we move to a new job or buy a house, we implicitly predict that our choice will turn out better than the alternatives. Improving foresight, especially about political events, is also of obvious interest to governments. This is why the IARPA, a research arm of the U.S. intelligence agency, funded a large scientific study in crowd prediction. At the Good Judgment Project, we had the opportunity to run dozens of experiments over four years, focused on a single question: How best do we distill the wisdom of crowds for political predictions?...

US Airways Flight 1549 took off from La Guardia Airport in New York City at 3:03 P.M. Eastern time on its way to Charlotte, N.C., with 150 passengers and five crew members on board. As it gained altitude, it reportedly ran into a “massive flock of birds,” according to The New York Times, and the jet engines began making noises—and lost power. Heading north without engine power, the pilot of the Airbus A320 changed course and—in what some are describing as a heroic but calm act—glided to a watery landing in full view of buildings on Manhattan’s west side....

From Scientific American, November 25, 1911, Volume 105 FEMINISM very nearly won a great victory in the French Academy of Sciences on January 23rd, 1911, when, in the election of a successor to the deceased academician Gernez, Marie Sklodowska Curie was defeated by two votes. At a joint meeting of the five academies which compose the Institut de France, a majority had opposed the admission of women, as contrary to tradition, but each academy was left to decide the question for itself....

An amazing landscape left behind by melting ice sheets offers clues to the future of Greenland’s shrinking glaciers, a new study suggests. The incredible terrain is in northern Canada, which is ridged with thousands of eskers — the sinuous, gravelly remains of streams and rivers that flowed beneath the ice. Canada was once buried beneath miles of ice, similar to the way Greenland is today. Called the Laurentide Ice Sheet, this massive ice cap covered all of Canada and parts of the northern United States 15,000 years ago....

Marcelo Gleiser, a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College and prolific science popularizer, has won this year’s Templeton Prize. Valued at just under $1.5 million, the award from the John Templeton Foundation annually recognizes an individual “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” Its past recipients include scientific luminaries such as Sir Martin Rees and Freeman Dyson, as well as religious or political leaders such as Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama....