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From Nature magazine Dale Frail couldn’t resist the prospect of watching a black hole swallow its prey. Frail, who is in charge of the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes near Socorro in New Mexico, had seen a report last month about a long-lived X-ray flare emanating from the centre of the Milky Way, home to a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Astronomers were speculating that the flare might be a sign that a gas cloud they had been tracking had begun its death spiral into the black hole....

By Geoff BrumfielSouth Korean manufacturer Samsung Electronics announced this week that it has begun mass production of a new kind of memory chip that stores information by melting and freezing tiny crystals. Known as phase-change memory (PCM), the idea was first proposed by physicists in the 1960s. Here, Nature explains how PCM works, why it has taken so long to develop and how it could change your mobile phone forever.What’s the big idea behind PCM?...

When the sun goes down, moths, beetles and other nocturnal insects that spread pollen between plants go to work. But the latest research reveals that these creatures might be at risk from artificial lighting. Scientists working in Switzerland report large drop-offs in pollinator visits as well as reduced fruit production in patches of cabbage thistle (Cirsium oleraceum) under artificial lighting at night, in a study published on 2 August in Nature1....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - A nuclear waste repository in New Mexico was ordered by the state on Tuesday to craft a plan to hasten the sealing off of underground vaults where drums of toxic, plutonium-tainted refuse from Los Alamos National Laboratory may have caused a radiation release. The directive by state Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said the drums, buried half a mile below ground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near the town of Carlsbad, “may present an imminent and substantial endangerment to health or the environment”....

From Nature magazine. Forget to charge your phone? Your MP3 player? Soon, a quick stroll in a special pair of shoes could provide enough power to keep both going for hours. There’s a lot of ‘oomph’ in a step: up to 10 watts of power is lost as heat each time a foot hits the ground. Mobile devices such as phones and laptops use between 1 and 15 watts, so harnessing our ‘foot power’ would make a notable difference for consumers....

Scientists have discovered a new strain—the first in 40 years—of Clostridium botulinum, the bacterium that is ultimately responsible for causing botulism. And although they have reported their findings in a scientific journal, the investigators have taken the extraordinary step of withholding key details of the discovery. That’s because the toxins made by C. botulinum are the most dangerous known to humankind and currently there is no antidote for a toxin generated by the new strain....

As Scientific American contributor Rachel Nuwer explains in our December issue, 40 percent of 40-year-olds in the U.S. wear reading glasses. It’s unclear what percentage of that population would be interested in a smartphone or tablet screen that corrects for the flaws in their vision but we predict that the number is high. As it turns out, Gordon Wetzstein of Stanford University and colleagues have developed just such a screen. In this video they explain how it works....

Key concepts Physics Materials science Engineering Tension Compression Introduction Have you ever helped cook a pot of spaghetti? Strands of spaghetti are pretty long, so sometimes people break them in half so they more easily fit into the pot. How exactly does spaghetti break? And what does this have to do with science? It turns out engineers and materials scientists study how materials break when they are bent. Although professional engineers might be more concerned with steel beams in a bridge, you can do a fun experiment with pasta in your kitchen!...

More than one in 10 Americans older than 12 takes antidepressants, according to a 2011 report by the National Center for Health Statistics. A significant but unknown number of children younger than 12 take them, too. Although most such drugs are not approved for young children, doctors have prescribed them off-label for years because they have been thought to have relatively mild side effects. Yet recent reports have revealed that important data about the safety of these drugs—especially their risks for children and adolescents—have been withheld from the medical community and the public....

Not too long ago a mysterious affliction called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) began to wipe out honeybee hives. These bees are responsible for most commercial pollination in the U.S., and their loss provoked fears that agriculture might begin to suffer as well. In 2009 the three of us, along with colleagues at Harvard University and Northeastern University, began to seriously consider what it would take to create a robotic bee colony....

The routines of tornado season are familiar ones across the Southeast: Residents keep weather radios close by, schools run tornado drills, and towns test sirens. But the deadly storms that swept through the region over Easter Sunday came amid a pandemic that has touched virtually every corner of the U.S., complicating disaster preparation and response. To maintain social distancing, officials in some locations decided against opening community shelters at all, while those in Louisiana’s Ouachita Parish, where several hundred homes were damaged, worked to house displaced people in hotels instead of shelters....

It was only about 10 minutes into the game when I fell on the soccer pitch this summer and tore a ligament in my knee. My subsequent trip to the hospital garnered me a specific diagnostic code that went to my insurance company. My insurer was then able to see why I sought care and billed accordingly. Despite significant upgrades in medical knowledge and care, the same thing would have happened a decade ago....

Whereas standard behind- and in-the-ear hearing aids work well in relatively quiet, more intimate settings, these devices often lose their effectiveness in larger, public spaces where background noise puts the hard of hearing at a disadvantage. Although the technology to solve this problem—induction-loop systems that broadcast sound directly to hearing aids and cochlear implants—has been available for years, implementation has lagged, advocates say, because not enough is being done to promote their use....

Among the 10 leading causes of death, Alzheimer’s disease, which ranks as number six, is the only one that cannot be prevented, slowed or cured. While deaths from heart disease have decreased by 14% since 2000, deaths from Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have increased by 89% in that same timeframe, says the Alzheimer’s Association. But Nicola Corbett, a research associate at the Hooper lab at the University of Manchester in the U....

By Quirin Schiermeier of Nature magazineClimate scientists warn that critical gaps in climate data could open up after the current generation of Earth-observation satellites comes to the end of its life, with the next generation nowhere near ready to take over.The problem is exacerbated by the lack of an adequate replacement for a pair of Earth-observation satellites, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory and Glory, which failed on launch in the past two years....

Planets and moons often get the spotlight, but there is much to learn about our solar system from its vast numbers of smaller bodies such as comets and asteroids. That is the mind-set of David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who found a cosmic conundrum when he observed a group of asteroids near Neptune. These objects are conventionally thought to derive from another group of asteroids known as the Kuiper Belt, which forms a ring well beyond Neptune....

Time’s seemingly inexorable march has always provoked interest in, and speculation about, the far future of the cosmos. The usual picture is grim. Five billion years from now the sun will puff itself into a red giant star and swallow the inner solar system before slowly fading to black. But this temporal frame captures only a tiny portion—in fact, an infinitesimal one—of the entire future. As astronomers look ahead, say, “five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years,” as humorist Douglas Adams did in 1980 in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, they meet a cosmos replete with myriad slow fades to oblivion....

A person’s experience as a child or teenager can have a profound impact on their future children’s lives, new work is showing. Rachel Yehuda, a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma, and her colleagues have long studied mass trauma survivors and their offspring. Their latest results reveal that descendants of people who survived the Holocaust have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, perhaps predisposing them to anxiety disorders....

When a crime witness mistakenly identifies the wrong person, the error can destroy an innocent life and let the real perpetrator walk free. Eyewitnesses are often tasked with selecting the face they remember from a group of both potential suspects and “fillers.” This traditionally involves looking at a line of people standing behind one-way glass or at an array of photographs. But a new study suggests that interacting with digital, three-dimensional models—a set of virtual heads that can be manipulated with a computer mouse—could make eyewitness evidence more accurate....

Bacteria in the genus Geobacter look like miniature kidney beans sprouting long, wirelike tails—and it turns out these “nanowires” really do conduct electricity. Scientists have been studying such conductive bacteria for decades, hoping to develop living technology that can work safely inside the human body, resist corrosion or even literally pull electricity out of thin air. But to make this practical, they first must unlock the mystery of how these minuscule fibers actually work—and a vigorous debate is shaping up....