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Perhaps the most surprising thing to be found in the new book Does It Fart? The Definitive Field Guide to Animal Flatulence is that not all mammals do. Dogs do—and often get blamed for it when they don’t. Gorillas do, anywhere they want. Horses do, including the legendary thoroughbred Hoof Hearted, whose name took on new meaning when the track announcer made his excited call. Hyenas do, and it smells really bad, for reasons you can probably sniff out, after they’ve eaten camel intestines, according to the book....

Imagine that the same rechargeable battery in your cell phone could power a device that requires 10 times the energy. That possibility may be closer than you think. A battery created by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated an increased capacity for charge by roughly a third and a power output 10 times higher, for its size, than what is expected of a conventional rechargeable lithium battery. The results were published yesterday in Nature Nanotechnology....

It’s make or break time for Comet c/2012 S1 (ISON), a ball of ice hurtling toward the inner solar system that will make its closest approach to the sun this month. Whether ISON will flare into a “great comet” or fizzle out is still an open question, but scientists say either way, ISON offers an unprecedented opportunity to understand the ingredients and history of the solar system. Comet ISON was discovered in September 2012 by two Russian astronomers using telescopes in the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON)....

At 3.36 a.m. today, I was awoken by an urgent, terrifying shaking of my bed. This, it later emerged, was the first shock wave of the 6.2-magnitude earthquake in central Italy that has killed dozens of people—and destroyed historic villages and small towns as lovely as the one where I am now staying on holiday. It was a sinister déjà vu—in 2009 I was awoken in Rome by an even more powerful quake—the one that destroyed L’Aquila....

Enver Tohti remembers the week that it rained dust. That summer of 1973 he was in elementary school in Xinjiang Province, China’s westernmost region, which is inhabited mostly by Uygurs, one of the country’s minority ethnic groups. “There were three days that earth fell from the sky, without wind or any sort of storm. The sky was deadly silent—no sun, no moon,” he recalls. When the kids asked what was happening, the teacher told them that there was a storm on Saturn (its Chinese name translates into “soil planet”)....

This story is a supplement to the feature “Digital Forensics: How Experts Uncover Doctored Images” which was printed in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American. Lighting Composite images made of pieces from different photographs can display subtle differences in the lighting conditions under which each person or object was originally photographed. Such discrepancies will often go unnoticed by the naked eye. For an image such as the one at the right, my group can estimate the direction of the light source for each person or object (arrows)....

The world is “3 minutes” from doomsday. That’s the grim outlook from board members of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Frustrated with a lack of international action to address climate change and shrink nuclear arsenals, they decided today (Jan. 22) to push the minute hand of their iconic “Doomsday Clock” to 11:57 p.m. It’s the first time the clock hands have moved in three years; since 2012, the clock had been fixed at 5 minutes to symbolic doom, midnight....

Lucy Jones is sitting in a tall chair in a conference room near her office in Pasadena, Calif. She is having makeup applied, preparing for a sit-down with a television crew from the National Geographic Channel. Only two days before, Hurricane Katrina had roared through New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas, stranding and killing thousands. Images of destroyed homes, desperate crowds and–after Hurricane Rita–interminable evacuation traffic make it easy to imagine a catastrophe that could have an even bigger impact on the national psyche: a high-magnitude earthquake under Los Angeles or San Francisco....

The European Union outlined an ambitious strategy to accelerate its clean energy transition yesterday in the face of spiking oil and gas prices and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The plan could potentially cut Europe’s reliance on Russian gas imports by two-thirds by the end of the year through a mixture of buying gas from other countries and ramping up energy efficiency measures. Those steps combined with more wind and solar, and faster permitting for large-scale clean energy projects, could help the E....

The Food and Drug Administration announced Thursday it has approved an Ebola vaccine developed by Merck, making it the first for the deadly disease approved in the United States. The vaccine, Ervebo, protects against Zaire ebolaviruses, the species of the virus that has been the most common cause of Ebola outbreaks. Ebola Zaire is the virus responsible for the current long-running outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The FDA’s decision follows similar action taken earlier by the European Commission, which licensed the vaccine on Nov....

When speaking about science to scientists, there is one thing that can be said that will almost always raise their indignation, and that is that science is inherently political and that the practice of science is a political act. Science, they will respond, has nothing to do with politics. But is that true? Let’s consider the relationship between knowledge and power. “Knowledge and power go hand in hand,” said Francis Bacon, “so that the way to increase in power is to increase in knowledge....

Three attributes of a good mountaineer are high pain threshold, bad memory, and … I forget the third.—Joke in a mountaineering Internet chat room IN THE LATE 1890s in a laboratory atop a 4,554-meter peak in the Monta Rosa range in the Italian Alps, physiologist Angelo Mosso made the first direct observations of the effects of high altitude on the human brain: by eye and with an apparatus he designed, Mosso peeked into the skull of a man whose brain had been partly exposed in an accident, observing changes in swelling and pulsation....

Come 2013, the burliest rocket in the world may belong not to NASA, Boeing or any of the other traditional heavy-hitters in the aerospace field. It will belong to a relative newcomer, if start-up spaceflight firm SpaceX has its way. PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, who heads up the Hawthorne, Calif., company, announced at an April 5 news conference that SpaceX is building a new rocket, called Falcon Heavy, with enough thrust to lift 53,000 kilograms into low Earth orbit....

With the world risking ecological disaster at every turn-climate change, water stress, habitat destruction, over-hunting and over-fishing, pollution-sustainability of the world economy will require action on several fronts. We will have to economize on our use of scarce and depleting resources, especially fossil fuels and natural habitats vital to other species. We will have to foster resource-saving technologies, such as environmentally sound fish-farming to substitute for over-harvesting of ocean fisheries. And we will have to help the poor regions of the world to complete the demographic transition to achieve stable populations, a process that is underway but by far not fast enough....

Many of us could easily name someone in the public eye (or even our private circle) whose aggressive personality only seems to get them more ahead in life. Do nice guys (and gals) truly finish last? Scientific American columnist Scott Barry Kaufman digs into this question in “The Personality Trait That Is Ripping America (and the World) Apart,” especially as it pertains to political beliefs. It turns out that highly antagonistic leaders have a special ability to fire up certain groups of people who share some of those antagonistic personality tendencies....

As someone who studies the impact of misinformation on society, I often wish the young entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley who enabled communication at speed had been forced to run a 9/11 scenario with their technologies before they deployed them commercially. One of the most iconic images from that day shows a large clustering of New Yorkers staring upward. The power of the photograph is that we know the horror they’re witnessing....

Smoking and drinking are two vices that often go hand in hand (one hand clutching a drink while the other holds a smoke). A decade ago, a study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol indicated that as many as 85 percent of heavy drinkers also light up. Smokers have various aids to help them quit the deadly habit, including varenicline, a drug manufactured by Pfizer that blocks nicotine from releasing the pleasure-associated neurotransmitter dopamine....

In work that may one day lead to earlier detection of children at risk of developing autism, a team of scientists has devised a genetic model for the enigmatic disorder. The two-tiered theory integrates families with one or more autistic children. An estimated one in every 150 children born in the U.S. develops autism, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC); it is four times more prevalent in boys than in girls....

Call it the reverse psychology of stuff. Imagine a cushion that swells up instead of compressing when you sit on it. Or a rubber band that shrinks instead of elongating when you stretch it. If two physicists at Northwestern University are right, scientists may soon be able to make materials with such mind-boggling behavior. The two researchers, Adilson Motter and Zachary Nicolaou, describe their proposal in work that appeared online in May in Nature Materials....

The new policy statement was released by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) today (Oct. 28) in the journal Pediatrics. The average 8-year-old spends eight hours a day using various forms of media, and teenagers often surpass 11 hours of media consumption daily, according to the authors of the AAP statement. More than three quarters of teenagers have cell phones, and teens ages 13 to 17 send an average of 3,364 texts per month....