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When making complex decisions, legitimate factors sometimes mask choices influenced by prejudice—so bias is hard to detect. Recent research untangled some of these complex scenarios revealing that people are willing to sacrifice quite a lot to fulfill their subconscious biases. Psychologists asked volunteers to imagine they and a partner would compete together in a trivia quiz. Participants viewed profiles of two potential partners that described each person’s education, IQ and previous trivia game experience....

Quasicrystals are a relative newcomer to the field of materials science, having been discovered just 25 years ago. Nudging their way between amorphous solids such as glass and crystals such as quartz, the structures exhibit an ordered structure like crystals do, but their uniqueness lies in the fact that the ordered arrangement does not repeat—that is to say, it is not periodic. Quasicrystals also lack translational symmetry. To give a two-dimensional analogue, the pattern cannot be shifted laterally without changing its appearance (unlike, say, an infinitely repeating checkerboard pattern, which can be shifted two squares in any direction and retain its original format)....

The first results from a long anticipated experiment have heaped doubt on decade-old observations that hinted at the existence of a fourth type of neutrino, a ghostly particle that rarely interacts with ordinary matter. Researchers from the MiniBooNE experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., announced the finding yesterday. Confirmation of the fourth neutrino would have given researchers a sign that something was wrong with their highly successful Standard Model, which describes the known particles....

Black holes have been a part of popular culture for decades now, most recently playing a central role in the plot of this year’s Star Trek movie. No wonder. These dark remnants of collapsed stars seem almost designed to play on some of our primal fears: a black hole harbors unfathomable mystery behind the curtain that is its “event horizon,” admits of no escape for anyone or anything that falls within, and irretrievably destroys all it ingests....

(Updates with online announcement by interior secretary) By Keith Coffman DENVER, Sept 22 (Reuters) - A long-simmering debate in the American West over an imperiled ground-dwelling bird reached a climax on Tuesday as the Obama administration announced its decision to deny Endangered Species Act Protection to the greater sage grouse. U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell revealed the decision in a video statement posted online ahead of an appearance slated for later in the day at a wildlife refuge in Colorado with four Western governors to unveil a multi-state conservation strategy for the grouse....

Ask Michael Wigler about the genetic basis of autism, and he will tell you that the standard genetic methods of tracing disease-causing mutations in families with multiple affected members are not working. Although most scientists agree that environmental influences play a role in disease onset, autism has a strong genetic component: among identical twins, if one is autistic, there is a 70 percent chance the other will show the disease, a risk factor nearly 10 times that observed in fraternal twins and regular siblings....

This month, my Scientific American column was about Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Max Tegmark and the alarm bells he’s been ringing about the potential dark side of artificial intelligence. He’s been joined in the headlines by fellow concerned citizens Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking. (AI is “the biggest existential threat” to the human race, says Tesla Motors and SpaceX founder Musk.) Tegmark is a compelling thinker. Here are some colorful excerpts from our conversation on why we should proceed carefully down the path to creating super-smart artificial intelligence....

Some 3.2 million Americans have chronic hepatitis C, an infection that can linger in the body for years before producing symptoms. It can eventually lead to serious liver scarring and cancer. And most infections in the U.S. are the disease’s particularly tough breed, known as genotype 1, which has a cure rate of less than 40 percent with the best current treatment. Two new drugs for this type, however, are now racing toward approval by the U....

Editor’s note: This story was originally posted in the April 2008 issue, and has been reposted to highlight the long intertwined history of the Nobel Prizes in Scientific American. In the blink of an eye, a wave of visible light completes a quadrillion (1015) oscillations, or cycles. That very large number presents both opportunities and a challenge. The opportunities promise numerous applications both inside and outside of laboratories. They go to the heart of our ability to measure frequencies and times with extremely high precision, a skill that scientists rely on for some of the best tests of laws of nature—and one that GPS systems, for instance, depend on....

By Jack Kim SEOUL (Reuters) - Two South Korean hospitals are conducting experimental treatment on Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) patients, injecting them with blood plasma from recovering patients, the health ministry said on Tuesday, as four new cases were reported. The procedure has been conducted on two consenting MERS patients in addition to existing care, the ministry’s head of public health policy, Kwon Jun-wook, told a media briefing. “There is insufficient clinical basis about the result of plasma treatment among experts in the country,” Kwon said, but added: “The ministry has deep confidence in the medical staff on the direction of the treatment....

If you were to trace both “sides” of a Möbius strip, you would never have to lift your finger. A single-sided surface with no boundaries, the strip is an artist’s reverie and a mathematician’s feat. A typical thought experiment to demonstrate how the three-dimensional strip operates involves imagining an ant on an adventure. Picture the insect traversing the Möbius band. One apparent loop would land the ant not where it started but upside down, only halfway through a full circuit....

TACLOBAN CITY, Philippines (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stepped up an appeal for funds to help the Philippines recover from a devastating typhoon last month after visiting stricken areas on Saturday.“I was very saddened by what I have seen in Tacloban – total destruction, and an enormous number of people have been lost, we need to support them,” Ban told Reuters after driving miles past flattened and damaged houses.Haiyan reduced almost everything in its path to rubble when it swept ashore in the central Philippines on November 8, killing at least 6,102 people, with nearly 1800 missing, and 4 million either homeless or with damaged homes....

As adults around the world scramble to get vaccinated against COVID-19, pharmaceutical companies are turning their attention toward one quarter of the population that still has no available shots: kids. Several pharmaceutical companies are doing clinical trials in adolescents or young children. Pfizer was already testing its vaccine in kids aged 12 to 15, and it just announced results showing that its vaccine works very well at preventing COVID in this age group....

Global girths are on the rise—with some 1.5 billion adults now overweight and more than one in 10 adults obese worldwide. U.S. figures are even starker: more than half of the population weighs too much and more than one third are obese. The causes of these conditions have turned out to be much more diverse than too much junk food and couch time. Research has now implicated factors as far-ranging as stress and the lack of quality sleep as complicit forces in the epidemic....

Clouds aren’t as easy to track deep into the past as carbon dioxide. But like CO2, clouds can play an important role in climate change: Either they can trap heat in the atmosphere, magnifying to the greenhouse effect, or they can reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the planet. So will clouds contribute to climate change or help mitigate it? “Right now, we don’t know what that relationship is,” says NASA atmospheric scientist Anthony Del Genio, who works at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City....

Two drugs approved for use in people—an antidepressant and a heart drug—might hold promise for treating Ebola, a new study in mice suggests. The researchers screened about 2,600 compounds for their ability to hinder Ebola virus activity, and found 30 drugs that were effective against the virus in a lab dish. Two of the drugs appeared particularly promising for their action against Ebola—the antidepressant sertraline (brand name Zoloft) and a heart drug called bepridil (brand name Vascor)....

In a tiny, darkened room on the Duke University campus, Miguel Nicolelis looks on approvingly while a pair of students monitors data streaming across computer screens. The brightly colored dashes and spikes reflect the real-time brain activity of a rhesus macaque named Clementine, who is walking at a leisurely pace on a little treadmill in the next room. Staticky pops coming from a speaker on a back wall are the amplified sound of one of her neurons firing....

Early to bed and early to rise may be a prescription for prosperity, but for some morning larks, it’s an unfortunate condition written in their genes. These people suffer from familial advanced sleep phase syndrome (FASPS), a rare condition in which people hit the hay and wake up about four hours before everyone else. A simple expulsion of protein from the cell nucleus seems to be at the root of the syndrome, report researchers who studied the way that a previously identified mutant protein behaved in cultured human skin cells....

Crime, congestion and pollution mar all cities, from Los Angeles to Mumbai. But another force trumps the drawbacks of urban living: cities bring opportunities for wealth and for the creative inspiration that can result only from face-to-face contact with others. In fact, the crush of people living in close quarters fosters the kind of collaborative creativity that has produced some of humanity’s best ideas, including the industrial revolution and the digital age....

Around the cosmos, black holes aren’t known for being the nicest neighbors. They tend to make their presence felt in unpleasant ways, pulling nearby matter inward even as they belch out violent blasts of plasma and radiation. Put two of them in the same neighborhood and the resulting tug-of-war can quickly turn ugly. But in a cluster of stars within the Milky Way, two black holes appear to have taken up residence in surprisingly close proximity....