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Scientists have restored and preserved some cellular activities and structures in the brains of pigs that had been decapitated for food production four hours before. The researchers saw circulation in major arteries and small blood vessels, metabolism and responsiveness to drugs at the cellular level and even spontaneous synaptic activity in neurons, among other things. The team formulated a unique solution and circulated it through the isolated brains using a network of pumps and filters called BrainEx....

Solar panels perched on the roofs of houses and other buildings are an increasingly common sight in the U.S., but rooftop wind systems have never caught on. Past efforts to scale down the towering turbines that generate wind power to something that might sit on a home have been plagued by too many technical problems to make such devices practical. Now, however, a new design could circumvent those issues by harnessing the same principle that creates lift for airplane wings....

From The Race Underground: Boston, New York and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America’s First Subway, by Doug Most. Reprinted by arrangement with Saint Martin’s Press. Copyright © 2014, by Doug Most. A Secret Subway They came on foot and by carriage, and from the city and around the country. On September 12, 1867, thousands of people lined up outside the Fourteenth Street Armory, a hulking gray building in downtown New York, to see what the future held for them....

Lagers are boring. When you pop a can of lager beer, you taste the product of closely related strains of Saccharomyces pastorianus. Their genetic variety pales in comparison to the small but diverse group of yeasts used for making ale and wine, which pump out vastly different metabolic by-products and a wide range of flavors. In fact, lagers have looked and tasted much the same for hundreds of years because breeding strains with new brewing characteristics and flavors has proved difficult; the hybrids were effectively sterile....

Some people love science for the crazy ideas, the ones that transport you beyond the everyday grind: black holes, alien life, anything with the word “quantum.” Others prefer the not-crazy ideas, the practical solutions: zippier computers, 100-mpg cars, cures for cureless diseases. So what do you make of an idea like Pleistocene rewilding? It manages to be both crazy and not crazy at the same time. As the article by C....

Sogbandi Botton was hired by the government to track down people who show symptoms of Ebola and deliver them to medical care. But Botton, a medical student, says that most of the health complaints he has heard lately can be traced to the side effects of a malaria drug. “People are vomiting and tired,” he says. “Two of them couldn’t even stand up.” In early December, public-health workers distributed malaria medication to 2....

During the pandemic, culling bats became common practice across the world—in a time when their habitats are already under grave existential threat. Bat populations are falling globally. Ironically, scientists theorize that the destruction of bats and their habitats may cause more disease outbreaks. But the impacts of the loss of bat species reach far beyond disease: bats serve crucial ecological roles in the most biodiverse regions of the world. “For millennia, bats have been associated with evil and darkness....

The Pentagon report on unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) that was delivered to Congress on June 25 is intriguing enough to motivate scientific inquiry towards the goal of what these phenomena are. The nature of UAP is not a philosophical matter. It’s also not a puzzle that politicians should be asked to resolve—for the same reason that plumbers should not be asked to bake cakes. Policy makers or military personnel have insufficient training in science to solve this mystery, and hoping that they will somehow do so is like the frustrating experience of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot....

Many physicists consider string theory our best hope for combining quantum physics and gravity into a unified theory of everything. Yet a contrary opinion is that the concept is practically pseudoscience, because it seems to be nearly impossible to test through experiments. Now some scientists say we may have a way to do exactly that, thanks to a new conjecture that pits string theory against cosmic expansion. What it comes down to is this question: Does the universe show us all of its quantum secrets, or does it somehow hide those details from our classical eyes?...

Slights with a smile. Silence when you know they can hear you. Compliments with a side of side-eye. Passive aggressive people know how to serve up a veritable buffet of “Oh no she didn’t.” And tacking on “LOL” afterwards doesn’t negate things. However it manifests, passive aggression is the fine art of being angry without seeming angry. There are two ingredients: anger and avoidance. The first, anger—or its cousins annoyance, frustration, or irritation—always bubbles beneath the surface....

Lake Mead, the massive reservoir created in the late 1930s by Hoover Dam on the Arizona–Nevada border, has dropped to its lowest level ever, it was reported earlier this month. The lake has been steadily growing shallower since drought began reducing the flow of its source, the Colorado River, starting in 2000 due to below-average snowfall in the Rockies. It is still too early to know whether the situation at Lake Mead and recent droughts throughout the U....

Key concepts Pressure Atmospheric pressure Air pressure Gravity Introduction Have you ever used a crazy straw? Some spiral their way up. Others have fancy colors or decorations. Some are thin and others are wide. But just about all of them leave you sipping your drink from about the same distance. Why? Wouldn’t it be fun to poke your head out of an upstairs window and secretly take a sip from a drink way below?...

The surface waters of the Arctic Ocean may be releasing “significant” amounts of methane into the atmosphere, researchers reported yesterday in the journal Nature Geoscience. Scientists flying a specially equipped plane over the region detected high concentrations of the heat-trapping gas close to the ocean surface during research flights in 2009 and 2010. During flights in the high Arctic, above 82 degrees north latitude, the research jet’s instruments detected methane that seemed to be coming from the ocean surface below....

Stone Age farmers lived through routine violence, and women weren’t spared from its toll, a new study finds. The analysis discovered that up to 1 in 6 skulls exhumed in Scandinavia from the late Stone Age — between about 6,000 and 3,700 years ago — had nasty head injuries. And contrary to findings from mass gravesites of the period, women were equally likely to be victims of deadly blows, according to the study published in the February issue of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology....

Excerpted from Coal Wars: The Future of Energy and the Fate of the Planet, by Richard Martin. Palgrave Macmillan Trade. Copyright © 2015. Reprinted with permission. (Scientific American is part of Macmillan Publishers.) By the early 20th century, the coal industry, though still fragmented, extended across China. The production and use of coal expanded after the forced opening of the empire following the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century. Despite the chaos that engulfed the countryside and the withering of the central government in the last decades of the Qing dynasty, coal helped accelerate industrialization: the first railway line officially sanctioned by the government was built to reach the Kaiping coal mines in Hebei Province....

Graphene, one of the most promising new materials to be developed in decades, isn’t much to look at. And it’s no wonder why. Researchers discovered graphene, or one-atom-thick sheets of carbon, by mechanically peeling progressively finer layers from raw flakes of graphite, the same stuff found in pencil lead (See: “Carbon Wonderland,” by Andre K. Geim and Philip Kim, in the April issue of Scientific American). Despite extensive efforts to develop practical applications for graphene and explore the exotic physics at work in its two dimensions, obtaining a usable sample is still more art than science, as Scientific American learned one slushy winter afternoon in the Columbia University lab of Philip Kim, one of our co-authors and a leader in the field....

Our son, Iago, currently in fourth grade at a public school in Brooklyn, N.Y., learned a new game at recess recently. One evening, after entertaining the family with his ever expanding repertoire of knock-knock jokes, he turned to one of us (Susana) and pointed his index finger at her arm, stopping just half an inch from her skin. She looked at her arm, intrigued, and then at Iago. “Am I touching you?...

November 1965 Artificial Heart “Up to a very few years ago the goal of planting an artificial heart in the body was not recognized as a bona fide scientific effort worthy of support, and papers describing experiments in that endeavor were not accepted by scientific or medical societies. Within the past five years, however, all of that has changed. Experimental animals (dogs and calves) have been kept alive for many hours with an artificial pump substituted for the natural heart in the chest....

The 2009 influenza pandemic appeared to come out of nowhere. It started as what seemed like a lethal outbreak in Mexico, then spread north of the border. By the time health officials learned that the virus responsible for the alarming explosion of cases was new and an infection threat to most of humankind, they had no way to keep it from spreading around the world. By a stroke of luck, symptoms were mild in the vast majority of cases....

By Zoe Cormier of Nature magazine Thanks to fluorescent labels that help them to spot cancerous tissue, surgeons have removed ovarian tumor cells that might otherwise have been left behind.Most malignant ovarian tumors express high numbers of receptors for the molecule folate (also known as vitamin B9), so by attaching the fluorescent molecule fluorescein iso-thiocyanate to folate, researchers created a cancer-cell probe. After injecting this into patients, labelled cells were made to glow white with a special camera and light, allowing surgeons to spot cancerous tissue even when cells were otherwise indistinguishable from their healthy counterparts....