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In a world where we are constantly tweeting, texting, Googling and checking e-mail, technology addiction is a real concern for today’s kids. Yet parents are often unable to unplug from their own digital devices, research suggests. A recent national survey conducted by Common Sense Media, which included nearly 1,800 parents of children aged eight to 18, found that parents spend an average of nine hours and 22 minutes every day in front of various screens—including smartphones, tablets, computers and televisions....

SANTA FE, N.M. — With NASA’s sample-caching 2020 Mars rover mission just around the corner, the best strategy for hauling Red Planet rock and dirt to Earth is a now a topic of considerable discussion and debate. Spoiler alert: Rocketing pieces of Mars to our planet isn’t an easy task! To grapple with the scientific, technological, and policy issues that come with such a robotic venture, NASA has created a Returned Sample Science Board (RSSB)....

The National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help....

As many as one third of the world’s 6,260 known amphibian species are in danger of going extinct. The main killer—outside of ongoing destruction of habitat—is a fungal disease known as chytrid (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis). Now researchers in California and Virginia have identified symbiotic bacteria living on amphibians’ skins that protects them from the deadly fungal disease, and later this summer the scientists will collect some of the microbial samples, culture them in the lab, and use the product to inoculate some frogs in California’s Sierra Nevada to see if the approach stops chytrid in the wild....

September 1964 Quanta of Space “In the theory of relativity, one of the two most notable scientific advances of this century (quantum theory is the other), the gravitational effect of gross matter has been reduced to geometry. Just as the geometry of a mountainous region requires a distance formula that varies from place to place to represent the varying shape of the land, so Einstein’s geometry has a variable distance formula to represent the different masses in space....

If you were asked to fall backward into the arms of a stranger, would you trust the other person to catch you? Such a situation, a common exercise in group therapy, is a bit extreme. But every day most people place some degree of trust in individuals they do not know. Unlike other mammals, we humans tend to spend a great deal of time around others who are unfamiliar. Those who live in cities, for instance, regularly navigate through a sea of strangers, deciding to avoid certain individuals but feeling secure that others will, say, give accurate directions to some destination or will, at the very least, refrain from attacking them....

EMMETSBURG, Iowa—The Project Liberty plant is a multi–$100-million effort to get ethanol for cars past the obstacles of food-versus-fuel debates, farmer recalcitrance and, ultimately, fossil fuels. It is also the fruition of a 16-year journey for founder and executive chairman Jeff Broin of ethanol-producing company POET—an odyssey that began with a pilot plant in Scotland, S.D., and progressed through a grant of $105 million from taxpayers via the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)....

For decades researchers have tried to enlist the body’s natural defenses against deadly tumors, using a variety of experimental vaccines, gene therapies and monoclonal antibodies, with mixed results. Now a new combination of immunotherapies seems to work better than anyone had expected. One of the investigators studying this particular approach is Jedd Wolchok of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, who has written “Cancer’s Off Switch,” a feature article in the May issue of Scientific American....

John Smith, a physicist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, belts out an answer to this query. In both speech and singing, we produce sustained vowel sounds by using vibrations of our vocal folds—small flaps of mucous membrane in our voice box (or Adams apple)—that periodically interrupt the airflow from the lungs. The folds vibrate at a fundamental frequency, fo, which determines the pitch of the sound....

Joshua Wurman, president of the Center for Severe Weather Research in Boulder, Colo., whips up a response. The glib answer for why tornadoes don’t strike urban areas that often is: Cities are small. If you take a look at Google Maps and see what percentage of the U.S. urban and suburban areas cover, it’s a pretty small fraction. The regions where you have peak tornado frequencies—from Texas up through Kansas, and even east toward Atlanta and the Southeast—are open country, so that’s where most tornadoes spend the overwhelming fraction of their lifetimes....

July brings Independence Day, a time for celebrating freedom. With this July is-sue, Scientific American shakes off the constraints of its past design and embraces more of the opportunities of publishing in the digital age. The topflight content of Scientific American is unchanged: our feature articles continue to be written by leading scientific authorities and journalists and illustrated by the finest artists. The layouts and figures, however, are more modern and approachable....

In his magical-realist masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez takes the reader to the mythical jungle village of Macondo, where, in one oft-recounted scene, residents suffer from a disease that causes them to lose all memory. The malady erases “the name and notion of things and finally the identity of people.” The symptoms persist until a traveling gypsy turns up with a drink “of a gentle color” that returns them to health....

Elvis Alonzo began smoking cannabis as a last resort. Three years in the Marine Corps and 13 years with the Glendale Police Department in Arizona—where he was exposed to murders, suicides and people dying in his arms—had left him emotionally crippled.* Toward the end of his police service, doctors diagnosed Alonzo with post-traumatic stress disorder and prescribed various medications to temper his nightmares and flashbacks. The drugs “turned me into a zombie,” he says....

The true measure of President Biden’s climate ambition may be the clean electricity standard he tucked into his massive $2.2 trillion infrastructure spending plan. Its goal is striking: 80% clean power in the United States by 2030. The details, however, are vague. And so is Biden’s plan B if it fails—an uncertainty that’s worrisome to both activists and academics. The lack of a clear backup plan underscores the importance of passing a clean electricity standard, they say....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazine The US Environmental Protection Agency is fighting tooth and nail to stop destructive mining practices that threaten the aquatic habitats and wildlife of the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. Wednesday is the deadline for the agency to submit legal arguments in its appeal against a decision that overturned its veto of a permit for a vast surfacing-mining operation in the area. Mountaintop mining involves removing large amounts of earth with explosives to allow the excavation of thin seams of coal beneath them....

Global warming is “unequivocal.” Sea levels are creeping up at the fastest rate in 2,000 years. Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have reached “levels unprecedented in at least the last 800,000 years” (or before modern humans evolved). Most importantly “human influence on the climate system is clear” and “continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming.” Those are some of the key messages in the “Summary for Policymakers” of the physical science of global warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released on September 27....

Last week Hawaii’s Supreme Court rescinded the construction permit for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), an estimated $1.4-billion observatory planned for Mauna Kea, the dormant volcano whose red dusted slopes rise 4,205 meters above the Pacific Ocean on the island of Hawaii. The court’s decision is the most recent battle wound in a years-long contest between astronomers and native Hawaiians as well as environmentalists who oppose the construction because of the sanctity of the mountain....

From Nature magazine The preprint server arXiv.org is perhaps best known as the preserve of theoretical physicists and astrophysicists. But 2008 saw an influx of submissions of unpublished manuscripts, or preprints, by condensed-matter physicists who wanted to stake claims to the fast-moving subject of iron-based superconductors called pnictides. Now the life sciences may be on the cusp of their own ‘pnictide moment’, with population geneticists leading the charge. In the past month, leading research groups have posted to arXiv high-profile papers on the genetic history of southern Africans1 and Europeans2....

The birth of subliminal advertising reads almost like a script from a television show. In this real-life story, the spotlight falls on James M. Vicary, an independent marketing researcher. On September 12, 1957, Vicary called a press conference to announce the results of an unusual experiment. Over the course of six weeks during the preceding summer, he had arranged to have slogans—specifically, “Eat popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola”—flashed for three milliseconds, every five seconds, onto a movie screen in Fort Lee, N....

Questions answered in this episode: “If we did travel at 99.9% the speed if light what would it look like? And I read that we could create something like a warp drive to travel without breaking the laws of physics. Is this true? - Tyler Claudio “… if you traveled over the speed of light you would go back in time? [If an] object or machine could go faster then the speed of light would it appear in the past?...