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A database designed to help researchers worldwide develop vaccines for avian and seasonal influenza viruses, not to mention the prolific H1N1 “swine flu,” is now at the center of an ugly rift between its co-creators. Both the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) Foundation that initiated the effort and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) that built the actual influenza gene sequence “EpiFlu” database claim ownership of the project, thanks to legal and financial entanglements that the courts will now have to sort through....

Silent Killers: Submarines and Underwater Warfare by James P. Delgado. Osprey, 2011 Dive into the history of submarines with maritime archaeologist and writer James P. Delgado of the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Administration. He traces the evolution of these undersea vehicles from their humble wooden ancestors to modern submersibles built for deep-sea exploration. EXCERPT A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness by Nassir Ghaemi. Penguin Press, 2011 Some kinds of insanity can produce better leadership during times of crisis....

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of five features on carbon capture and storage, running daily from April 6 to April 10, 2009. For more than a decade, Norwegian oil company Statoil Hydro has been stripping climate change–causing carbon dioxide (CO2) from natural gas in its Sleipner West field and burying it beneath the seabed rather than venting it into the atmosphere. The company estimates that since 1996 it has stored more than 10 million-plus metric tons of CO2 some 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) down in the sandstone formation from which it came—and all of it has stayed put, which means storage may be the simplest part of the carbon capture and storage (CCS) challenge....

“There are three types of mathematicians, those who can count and those who can’t.” Bad joke? You bet. But what makes this amusing is that the joke is triggered by our perception of a paradox, a breakdown in mathematical logic that activates regions of the brain located in the right prefrontal cortex. These regions are sensitive to the perception of causality and alert us to situations that are suspect or fishy — possible sources of danger where a situation just doesn’t seem to add up....

The headlines were different when the biweekly broadsheet began, but the engine of innovation behind them was the same as it is today: science. Readers of Scientific American’s first issue, dated August 28, 1845, must have been struck by the front-page story on “Improved Rail-Road Cars” that were “calculated to avoid atmospheric resistance.” They may have marveled at the item about Morse’s telegraph, which speculated: “This wonder of the age, which has for several months past been in operation between Washington and Baltimore, appears likely to come into general use through the length and breadth of the land....

View the water slide show Although Earth is known as the “Blue Planet,” very little of that which makes it blue is of much use to us. Fully 97 percent of the world’s water is too salty for us to use to slake our thirst, grow our food or wash our clothes. The wise management of the small amount of available freshwater will pose one of the biggest challenges to mankind during the coming decades....

MIAMI—Observations from NASA space telescopes have revealed new quirks about the supermassive black holes at the heart of two galaxies. In the supersize elliptical galaxy M87 some 55 million light-years away, for one, the black hole is not in the galaxy’s center of mass, apparently having been pushed askew by some violent process. And in the Andromeda Galaxy, a neighbor to our own Milky Way just 2.5 million light-years away, the black hole appears to have recently—and very suddenly—awoken from a slumber....

By Lucas LaursenWhen a new species comes to light, its effect on the arrangement of its family tree might be better measured by statistics than by headlines. In a study of primates and flightless dinosaurs, researchers at Bristol University, UK, have found that the likelihood of any given find shaking up the family tree depends on how complete that tree was to begin with. The catarrhine family tree–one of two primate lineages, and the one that includes humans–regularly attracts requests for revision from palaeontologists bearing fossils such as Ida, according to palaeobiologist James Tarver, lead author of the latest study....

NEW YORK – Could coal be the key to manufacturing lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles, including electric cars? It may seem counterintuitive to use coal to reduce a vehicle’s fuel consumption, and thus its CO2 output. But one scientist at a New York technical school thinks he’s found a way, and hopes to market it to automakers and the growing electric vehicle industry. Dr. Nikhil Gupta, an instructor at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in downtown Brooklyn, says the secret lies in the cumbersome and ubiquitous waste product from burning coal – fly ash....

Lockdowns enacted during the early days of the pandemic saved millions of lives and prevented tens of millions of infections. But in most places, quarantine measures were never perfectly implemented. While governments have the power to close businesses and other places where people publicly gather, mandates in the U.S. did not prevent citizens from meeting with friends and family at home. Anecdotally, informal social gatherings such as holiday get-togethers, parties and weddings seem to have played an important role in spreading the virus....

By Gopal Sharma KATHMANDU (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Mountaineering tourism in Nepal faces a threat from global warming as melting glaciers feed the risk of more deadly disasters such as the avalanche on Mount Everest that killed 16 people last month, scientists said on Tuesday. More than 2,000 foreign mountaineers flock to the Himalayan nation sandwiched between India and China each year, mainly to climb the world’s highest mountain, generating revenue of $3....

A 60-year drought that scorched the Southwest during the 12th century may be a harbinger of things to come as greenhouse gases warm the Earth, according to research published December 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study’s authors used tree rings to reconstruct a portrait of droughts that struck the Southwest over a 1,200-year period stretching back to 900 A.D. They believe that understanding the droughts of the past could help water managers plan for future dry periods that are expected to become more intense as climate change worsens....

History is not often thought of as a science, but it can be if it uses the comparative method. Jared Diamond, professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and James A. Robinson, professor of government at Harvard University, employ the method effectively in the new book they have co-edited, Natural Experiments of History (Harvard University Press, 2010). In a timely study comparing Haiti with the Dominican Republic, for example, Diamond demonstrates that although both countries inhabit the same island, Hispaniola, because of geopolitical differences one ended up dirt poor while the other flourished....

The pandemic has been a hard time for most people, even if not everyone is struggling in the same way. Families, for example—mothers in particular—had to shift their routines drastically to accommodate remote schooling schedules for kids, which disrupted daily life in big ways. Several of my mom friends lamented to me repeatedly that they felt shame about giving their children the iPad to occupy them or letting them watch inordinate amounts of TV so the adults could get their own tasks done (or just have a break!...

By Zoe Corbyn of Nature magazine Just how much can activity on Facebook influence the real world? About 340,000 extra people turned out to vote in the 2010 US congressional elections because of a single election-day Facebook message, estimate researchers who ran an experiment involving 61 million users of the social network. The study, published today in Nature, is the first to demonstrate that the online world can affect a significant real-world behavior on a large scale, say the researchers....

Scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have fitted rats with kidneys that were grown in a lab from stripped-down kidney scaffolds. When transplanted, these ‘bioengineered’ organs starting filtering the rodents’ blood and making urine. The team, led by organ-regeneration specialist Harald Ott, started with the kidneys of recently deceased rats and used detergent to strip away the cells, leaving behind the underlying scaffold of connective tissues such as the structural components of blood vessels....

For scientists searching the skies for other Earth-like planets—other living worlds—the brightest hope may be a quiet star too dim to be seen with the naked eye, a sedate and solitary red dwarf called LHS 1140 nestled just 40 light-years away in the southern constellation Cetus. There an international team of astronomers has found a world that, although not a twin of Earth, certainly counts as a close cousin. LHS 1140 b is a “super-Earth,” a planet bigger than ours but smaller than Neptune, and the most common variety of world thought to exist in our galaxy....

A possible treatment for autism, tail-chasing dogs as a model of human obsessive-compulsive disorder, and what researchers could do with an extra-stretchy version of a material known as a hydrogel are a few of the topics explored in Scientific American’s November Advances. Research papers and links to online materials are listed below. The Autism Pill Two recent studies on arbaclofen are behind a paywall in Science Translational Medicine. Clinicaltrials.gov lists ongoing studies involving the drug, also designated as STX209....

By Tiffany O’CallaghanFoldable, flexible microparticles modelled on red blood cells may hold a key to the development of longer-acting, better-targeted drugs, and could even open up the possibility of making synthetic blood, according to a new study.Researchers already know that particle structure affects how well a drug is distributed throughout the body and how long it circulates in the bloodstream. Smaller particles tend to circulate longer because they can more easily pass through tiny blood vessels, for example....

Several years ago I found myself where I would never have expected: at a conference of string theorists. My own field is condensed matter: the study of materials such as metals and superconductors, which we cool in the laboratory to temperatures near absolute zero. That is about as far as you can possibly get from string theory without leaving physics altogether. String theorists seek to describe the universe at energies far in excess of anything experienced in a lab or indeed anywhere else in the known universe....