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Average citizens in affluent nations often have many questions about the effects of economic globalization on rich and poor nations and about how developing countries spend the aid they receive. Here are a few brief answers: Is globalization making the rich richer and the poor poorer? Generally, the answer is no. Economic globalization is supporting very rapid advances of many impoverished economies, notably in Asia. International trade and foreign investment inflows have been major factors in China’s remarkable economic growth during the past quarter century and in India’s fast economic growth since the early 1990s....

A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary CRISPR–Cas9 technique. On October 28, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu. Earlier clinical trials using cells edited with a different technique have excited clinicians....

Epidemics from Europe that killed thousands of indigenous Canadians in the nineteenth century have left their signatures in the genomes of the people living there today, researchers say. The Tsimshian people, who live in coastal British Columbia and Alaska and are among Canada’s First Nations, suffered a severe population crash around the nineteenth century, as European colonizers brought diseases including smallpox to communities that had not acquired resistance. The population decline is documented in reports from the time and in oral histories....

A tiny, creeping menace is threatening forests across Europe. And scientists believe climate change is a big part of the problem. New research finds that European forests have become more vulnerable to insect pest outbreaks over the last four decades, and especially since the year 2000. The study used a combination of on-site observations, satellite data and models based on machine-learning technology to investigate the way European forests are responding to climate-related disturbances....

Reporting by John Irish; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky France has decided to end a more than 30-year old law that banned homosexual men from donating blood, a measure originally put in place to stop the spread of diseases such as HIV. Health Minister Marisol Touraine said on Wednesday discrimination against potential blood donors on the basis of sexual orientation was unacceptable because it presumed that homosexual men all had HIV. After a review of the measure since 2012, Touraine opted to lift the exclusion that has been in place since 1983 and was subsequently reinforced three times....

A few weeks after the birth of my first son, I caught myself rocking a stick of butter to sleep while in line at the supermarket checkout. I gently moved the shopping cart back and forth, until I became aware of what I was doing and stopped in the hope that no one had observed me. My son was one of those kids who often got jolted out of his sleep for no apparent reason....

President Obama’s plan for NASA—or at least a modified version of it—cleared a major hurdle late on Sept. 29, when the House of Representatives agreed to the Senate’s version of a three-year authorization bill for the space agency. The legislation would add one space shuttle flight to the docket, raising the total number of remaining shuttle missions to three, and would pave the way for commercial operators to return astronauts to orbit once the shuttle is retired in 2011....

Astronomers have caught the giant black hole at our galaxy’s centre stretching the light emitted by an orbiting star—nearly three decades after they first starting tracking the star. The long-sought phenomenon, known as gravitational redshift, was predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, but until now it had never been spotted in the environs of a black hole. “It’s another big step in getting closer to understanding the black hole,” says Heino Falcke, an astronomer at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the research....

Saturn’s mysterious moon Titan revealed another of its secrets during a recent Cassini flyby: 75 lakelike areas near the northern pole. Planetary scientists believe they are liquid-filled depressions, because the temperature–a frosty minus 179 degrees Celsius–and pressure–1.5 times what we feel on Earth–are ripe for liquid methane or ethane to persist. These areas also share similar formations, including channels, with lakes on Earth. “Our July radar pass was our first look above 70 degrees north,” explains Ellen Stofan, a planetary geologist at Proxemy Research....

PERU Analysis of 700,000 years of sediment from an Andean lake shows that tropical mountain glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere grow and shrink in sync with ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, despite local differences in climate and sunlight. They are shaped by greenhouse gases, Earth’s orbit and other global factors. CANADA Researchers used key photos from amateur astronomers to help explain a mysterious red glow appearing alongside the Northern Lights....

Don’t expect big proposals tonight. In past State of the Union addresses, President Obama floated a clean energy standard, pushed Congress unsuccessfully to act on climate change and signaled to the nation the start of an executive agenda to reduce carbon emissions. This year, he’ll talk about what he’s already achieved rather than unveil new visions about stemming climbing temperatures, observers believe. The speech opens his last year in office, a period in which he could focus on safeguarding his climate policies and further propel the issue into the minds of the public....

Before a fight, many animals size up their opponents—however briefly. Even a once-over can provide crucial information about whether to stay and risk injury or turn and flee. Some animals have evolved telltale signs or behaviors that allow them to efficiently judge one another’s strength and avoid any unnecessarily costly battles. Deer assess their peers’ antlers, and some birds and lizards intimidate one another with prominent patches of color. But what evolutionary pressures prevent an animal from deceiving its peers by looking like a bully when it’s really a pushover?...

A decimated planetary system around a distant star holds the relics of a giant asteroid that may have once been flooded with water. The finding offers intriguing clues as to how planets become habitable, and may also provide an unsettling peek at what our own solar system might be in for. This system lies 170 light-years away and is centered on a star, GD 61, that is nearing the end of its life....

Over the next few weeks officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) face a tough and politically charged call. The Muslim month of fasting, Ramadan, begins July 9 and could draw as many as two million people from around the globe to the holy sites of Saudi Arabia in a pilgrimage called umrah. But a new disease, called Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, or MERS, could threaten them. Infectious disease control at mass gatherings is always a challenge, but this year even more so....

A stained-glass spiral of cells from an aloe plant, an old-growth forest of neural cells in the retina of a mouse, a starry sea of leaf hairs on a garden shrub—organisms have a way of reinventing themselves rather spectacularly under the microscope, giving observers a new appreciation for what Charles Darwin termed nature’s “endless forms most beautiful.” In these tiny worlds, beauty arises from both the brilliance of evolution’s small-scale solutions to life’s challenges and the techniques microscopists use to visualize biological structures and processes....

South Korea has unveiled designs for its planned Moon lander, a key part of President Park Geun-hye’s pledge to revitalize the country’s aerospace industry and space program. The uncrewed module — of which a scaled-down mock-up was unveiled to the press on 22 October — will travel on board a Korea Space Launch Vehicle-2 rocket and is designed to carry a lunar rover weighing 10–20 kilograms, which will look for signs of rare minerals on the Moon’s surface....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineResearch groups at the Tevatron, the proton-antiproton collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, have reached starkly different conclusions about a possible sighting of new particles beyond what is expected under the standard model of particle physics.In April, researchers on the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experiment reported tentative evidence that particles not predicted by the standard model had surfaced in collisions that produced a W boson–a particle of the weak nuclear force–and jets of other particles....

“Nothing is so unbelievable that oratory cannot make it acceptable.” —Marcus Tullius Cicero I don’t know about you, but most of my attempts at persuasion end up going ’round in circles: impassioned, long-winded affairs that seem as if they’re working. But aren’t. This is why I’ve become fascinated with something I call “supersuasion,” a brand-new kind of influence that disables our cognitive security systems in seconds. Animals do it. Babies do it....

Year-end lists inevitably leave room for debate and criticism, and ours is no exception. It was an eventful year, and we relied on voting among Scientific American editors to cull our candidates. Any of these notable achievements were certainly worthy but didn’t make the final cut. The runners-up were: • The discovery in South Africa of a new hominid, called Australopithecus sediba, that could be a lost member of our family tree • The emergence of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a controversial way to recover natural gas trapped in deep rocks • The detection of an atmosphere of a “super-Earth” and other signs of potentially habitable worlds around other stars • The recommendation by an advisory committee for the U....

The moon may carry material produced by life from Earth dating back to when plants first filled the planet’s air with oxygen, according to study of data from a Japanese lunar orbiter. A team led by Kentaro Terada of Osaka University looked at data from the Selenological and Engineering Explorer, better known as Kaguya. The researchers found that a certain kind of oxygen isotope was present in the lunar soil, an isotope that occurs on Earth....