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Chemistry textbooks typically include illustrations of atoms, but with caveats. The drawings depict atomic nuclei surrounded by electron orbitals—fuzzy spheres, barbells, tripods, and so on—but those figures represent the probability of finding an electron at a certain place around the nucleus rather than an actual “shape.” Researchers have now managed to image the electron orbitals and show for the first time that, in a sense, atoms really look like those textbook images....

By Maggie Fick and Mahmoud Mourad KAHA Egypt (Reuters) - In the Nile Delta province of Qalubiya, lifelong residents remember the days when lush farmland stretched as far as the eye could see. Today, their view is marred by unfinished brick tenement buildings with metal rods jutting into the sky - signs of the growing problem of illegal construction in Egypt’s agricultural heartland. The unlicensed building is more than an eyesore - it threatens plans by the world’s top wheat importer to cut its costly imports bill by growing more locally....

Climate change consistently polls low among Americans’ priorities, and it can be difficult for citizens to grasp how greenhouse gases affect their lives, unlike more directly visceral challenges such as gun violence or income inequality, Yesterday afternoon, President Obama, with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, tried to bring the topic down to a level that average Americans can understand by distilling the health impacts of climate change during a roundtable discussion at Howard University....

The possibility of life on Mars may not be consigned to the distant past. New research suggests our neighboring world could hide enough oxygen in briny liquid water near its surface to support microbial life, opening up a wealth of potentially habitable regions across the entire planet. Although the findings do not directly measure the oxygen content of brines known to exist on the Red Planet, they constitute an important step toward determining where life could exist there today....

Glass partitions us from other people and the elements, while letting light through. But that transmission can be a problem if we want to have privacy or to block the sun’s heat. Smart glass can help, letting us change the properties of windows on demand. At the push of a button, liquid-crystal glass can rapidly transform from clear to frosted, turning a see-through conference room wall, shower stall or ambulance rear window into a visual barrier....

Now the trend may be reversing itself again. Recently a number of natural compounds–such as resveratrol from red wine and omega-3 fatty acids from fish oil–have begun to receive close scrutiny because preliminary research suggests they might treat and prevent disease inexpensively with few side effects. Turmeric, an orange-yellow powder from an Asian plant, Curcuma longa, has joined this list. No longer is it just an ingredient in vindaloos and tandooris that, since ancient times, has flavored food and prevented spoilage....

Recently, as a result of my most recent book, A Universe from Nothing, I participated in a wide-ranging and in-depth interview for The Atlantic on questions ranging from the nature of nothing to the best way to encourage people to learn about the fascinating new results in cosmology. The interview was based on the transcript of a recorded conversation and was hard hitting (and, from my point of view, the interviewer was impressive in his depth), but my friend Dan Dennett recently wrote to me to say that it has been interpreted (probably because it included some verbal off-the-cuff remarks, rather than carefully crafted written responses) by a number of his colleagues and readers as implying a blanket condemnation of philosophy as a discipline, something I had not intended....

This is part of a series of SA Forum essays produced with the World Economic Forum that runs during its annual meeting, the Summit on the Global Agenda, held in Abu Dhabi November 18-20, 2013. The human race has never needed innovation more urgently than it does right now. We are causing and facing unprecedented problems, and those problems require unprecedented solutions—in a word, innovation. Much of the knowledge essential to innovation lies hidden within existing patent literature....

How many people in the U.S. have died from COVID? We know it is more than half a million, but the official count could miss tens of thousands of deaths. In TV police procedurals, the people who investigate premature deaths are depicted as highly trained, objective experts. In reality, the system in the U.S. is far less rigorous. The majority of states rely at least in part on coroners to rule on the circumstances surrounding unexpected or suspicious deaths—and contrary to what most of us probably believe, coroners are often laypeople without training in medicine....

Charities looking for donations after a natural disaster may want to avoid linking the disaster to climate change, a study from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, suggests. Researchers found that climate change skeptics are more likely to justify withholding aid if a drought, typhoon or flood is attributed to climate change than if appeals for aid do not mention the phenomenon. “What our work suggests is that when a disaster occurs and organizations are appealing to the public for aid, it is best to minimize the inclusion of heavily politicized topics,” Daniel Chapman, lead author of the study and a graduate student in social psychology, said in an email....

Even veteran disaster investigators were stunned by the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The next thoughts of the researchers who probed the calamity, aside from outrage, were how and why it happened from an engineering perspective. Why did WTC 1 stand nearly twice as long as WTC 2 after the impact of the aircraft? How could World Trade Center Building 7, which a plane did not hit, stand for seven hours and then collapse?...

By Steve Gorman The American Red Cross appealed on Tuesday to prospective donors who have visited Zika outbreak zones to wait at least 28 days before giving blood, but said the risk of transmitting the virus through blood donations remained “extremely” low in the continental United States. The “self-deferral” notice for blood donors should apply to those who have visited Mexico, the Caribbean, or Central or South America during the past four weeks, the Red Cross said in a statement....

David Rothstein, a postdoctoral fellow in Cornell University’s astronomy department, searches the universe for an answer to this question. Our universe is expanding—astronomers have piled up observations, over many decades, which suggest that other galaxies appear to be moving away from our own Milky Way galaxy (and from each other) at fantastic speeds. There are some small deviations from this pattern, but if you were to “pan the camera back” and take in the universe as a whole, the overall sense would be that galaxies are rushing away from each other, with farther galaxies moving away proportionally faster—a paradigm known as Hubble’s Law....

Tokyo Electric Co. crews prepared Monday to pump seawater into a third reactor at the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in order to prevent or halt a meltdown of its fuel assemblies, hours after a second explosion of leaked hydrogen gas rocked another reactor building at the site on Japan’s northeast coast. Experts called the injection of seawater and neutron-absorbing boron into the site’s three crippled reactors units a desperation move never attempted before in the industry....

Internet interruptions caused by extreme weather events sap billions of dollars annually from the global economy and can interfere with the delivery of essential data and services by governments, utilities and first responders. A Boston-based startup is trying to address that problem by applying climate resilience and adaptation principles to the internet, which experts say is vulnerable to climate change. The firm, called Climate Resilient Internet LLC (CRi), last week rolled out a systems design platform that allows data to bypass traditional fiber optic lines—most of which are strung along utility poles or buried underground—and connect data centers to end users through a dedicated wireless network....

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazineTwo of the largest studies yet carried out on the genetics of schizophrenia in Chinese populations have turned up three genetic loci, or chromosomal regions, previously not known to be related to the disease.These genome-wide association studies (GWAS), done independently and published in Nature Genetics on October 30, also begin to redress a geographical imbalance: until now, GWAS have focused mainly on Western populations.Roughly 1 in 100 people will suffer from schizophrenia in their lifetimes, which is considered largely heritable (up to 80%)....

The flimsy strip of golden film lying on John Wyatt’s desk looks more like a candy wrapper than something you would willingly put in your eye. Blow on it, and the two-millimeter foil curls like cellophane. Rub it, and the shiny film squeaks faintly between your fingers. In fact, you have to peer rather closely to spot a neat patchwork: a tiny photodiode array, designed to bypass damaged cells in a retina and, Wyatt hopes, allow the blind to see....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineFor once, there is good news for the environment: a flurry of international conservation initiatives and environmental research projects were given the green light last week. They were backed with more than half a billion US dollars in grants from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) in Washington DC, the world’s largest funder of environmental projects.The GEF’s funding round for 2011 has shared $516.4 million between 40 individual projects and 9 larger programmes....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. If you’ve read or listened to Everyday Einstein’s episode on quantum computing, you probably find yourself left with more questions than answers. You’re not alone. Quantum computing is such a complex idea, it stumps even the brightest scientific minds. But for our practical purposes, the main question is: How is a quantum computer different than your laptop or desktop?...

The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a rumor that has circulated for years. The rumor is an embellishment of one started in the 1970s, which asserted that 75 percent of all people ever born were alive at that time. In 1995 demographer Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau, a nongovernmental organization in Washington, D.C., addressed the issue by calculating how many people had ever existed, a number he updated in 2002....