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We take our astonishing visual capabilities so much for granted that few of us ever stop to consider how we actually see. For decades, scientists have likened our visual-processing machinery to a television camera: the eye’s lens focuses incoming light onto an array of photoreceptors in the retina. These light detectors magically convert those photons into electrical signals that are sent along the optic nerve to the brain for processing. But recent experiments by the two of us and others indicate that this analogy is inadequate....

A friend complained to me recently that his son wasn’t getting into Ivy League colleges because it’s so hard for a middle-class white kid to be admitted, even with straight A’s. I asked if the advantages of being a middle-class white kid might be part of the reason his son had become a straight-A student in the first place. It got awkward. As our politics have fractured increasingly around race, there seems to be more and more confusion about who’s discriminating against whom....

“Smart” phones offer the intelligence of a computer, with the convenience of a phone. “Smart” meters let homeowners choose between using cheap and expensive electricity. The next frontier: “smart” trash? A 5-year-old group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spent the last year attaching thousands of tracking devices to pieces of garbage in Seattle and New York City. The devices send out pulses to signal where they are. The signals go to MIT’s SENSEable City Lab for analysis....

From Nature magazine HIV is finally revealing its weak spots to researchers, bringing an effective vaccine against AIDS closer to reality. A paper published in Nature today1 sheds light on how a vaccine can turn the immune system against the invading virus and so offer protection from infection. The results are also being presented at the AIDS Vaccine 2012 conference in Boston, Massachusetts, this week. The findings help to explain the results from a clinical trial of an AIDS vaccine that have puzzled researchers since they were published three years ago2....

The result was a trove of 2,363 diaries filled with the everyday details of British lives. “8 a.m., Eating breakfast,” read one; “8.30 a.m., Taking children to school; 9 a.m., Cleaning away, washing up and listening to Housewives’ Choice”—a popular radio record-request programme of the day. Today, these files are part of the biggest collection of time-use diaries in the world, kept by the Centre for Time Use Research at the University of Oxford, UK....

Brianna Commerford felt a lump. After a few months of feeling mildly ill, she was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was devastated, she was scared, and she was only 9 years old. Five years later, Brianna is still alive thanks to an experimental treatment she received from the Children’s Oncology Group. Devoted to curing childhood and adolescent cancer, the COG is a clinical trials group that is primarily supported by the U....

The scenario might sound like the opening line of a science-themed comedy routine: a molecular biologist and a Bible scholar meet on a bus. Eight years after that encounter the two have developed a new technique using DNA sequencing that they say will enable them to match—or separate—minuscule fragments of the 2,000-year-old Dead Sea Scrolls. Their research was published on Tuesday in Cell. Oded Rechavi investigates inheritance in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, and Noam Mizrahi studies ancient Hebrew literature....

By Patricio Segura Ortiz of Nature magazineYou might not expect bacteria living in Antarctic ice to be well suited to life in a boiling kettle, but that is what Chilean scientists discovered during an expedition last year. The researchers have turned up more than 200 new species of microorganisms adapted to living in extreme environments.“We have discovered over 300 microorganisms, of which 70% correspond to new species,” says Jenny Blamey, a biochemist and director of the Biosciences Foundation in Santiago, a leading organisation in Antarctic Bioresources, a public-private initiative begun in 2008 to identify biological resources with potential biotechnological uses in this largely unexplored territory....

The Advances section of Scientific American’s April issue chronicles the work of researchers trying to stop the spread of dengue fever in Australia, reports on a forthcoming test that may tell patients how quickly they’re aging, and delves into the mysteries of horseshoe crab mating rituals, among many other subjects. For those interested in learning more about any of the developments described in this section, a list of selected further reading follows below....

“I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.” —Al Pacino in Scarface, 1983 In the studio of sculptor Tom Eckert, life appears to imitate art. A new snow shovel—Eckert cannot get much use of it in Tempe, Ariz.—hangs on the back wall, covered by a sheer piece of fabric. We had seen photographs of Eckert’s art before our visit, so we suspect that the translucent curtain is carved out of wood....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The Atlantic hurricane season starts on June 1, and the Gulf of Mexico is already warmer than average. Even more worrying is a current of warm tropical water that is looping unusually far into the Gulf for this time of year, with the power to turn tropical storms into monster hurricanes. It’s called the Loop Current, and it’s the 800-pound gorilla of Gulf hurricane risks....

For children and adults who have conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Tourette syndrome or autism, repetitive thoughts and actions can occur even if the individuals do not want them to. In OCD a thought that repeats again and again—“my hands are dirty, my hands are dirty”—can recur in a habitual way. Such conditions occur in people from different countries and cultures, suggesting that they represent a core dysfunction related to an imbalance between behaviors....

Key concepts Reflection Mirrors Light Infinity Introduction Can you imagine a bouncy ball that could bounce back and forth between two walls, infinitely—that is, forever? Wouldn’t that be amazing? What if, instead of a ball, light was bouncing between two walls, which were both covered in mirrors? Do you think that could bounce back and forth forever? Imagine each light bounce added one reflection of an object in the mirror—for example, you!...

Nearly 40 percent of Americans belong to a racial or ethnic minority, but the patients who participate in clinical trials for new drugs skew heavily white—in some cases, 80 to 90 percent. Yet nonwhite patients will ultimately take the drugs that come out of clinical studies, and that leads to a real problem. The symptoms of conditions such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as well as the contributing factors, vary across lines of ethnicity, as they do between the sexes....

NEW YORK – Two views of multinational corporations and their role in the climate crisis clashed in the world’s financial capital today. Thousands of protesters converged on lower Manhattan in a “flood Wall Street” action, with a rallying cry to “stop capitalism” – described by organizers as “the root cause” of the crisis. At the same time in midtown Manhattan, a 90-year-old museum and library dedicated to the memory of financier J....

The world’s most sensitive search for dark matter announced today that it has found—nothing. The first results from the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) detector are null, scientists say, indicating that the invisible matter thought to make up a large chunk of the universe is even more elusive than many experts thought. Buried about a kilometer and a half underground in a repurposed South Dakota gold mine that is now the Sanford Underground Research Facility, the LUX experiment searches for signs of dark matter particles colliding with the atoms in a vat of liquid xenon....

OSLO, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions of 40 to 70 percent by mid-century will be needed to avert the worst of global warming that is already harming all continents, a draft U.N. report showed. The 26-page draft, obtained by Reuters on Thursday, sums up three U.N. scientific reports published over the past year as a guide for almost 200 governments which are due to agree a deal to combat climate change at a summit in Paris in late 2015....

Lake Merritt is a tidal lagoon in the heart of Oakland, Calif. The oldest wildlife refuge in the U.S., it is home to numerous birds and shares many marine species with nearby San Francisco Bay. Even sea otters occasionally visit. Last weekend the Lake Merritt BioBlitz set out to explore this rich biodiversity and got a taste of the future of citizen science. Supported by iNaturalist, the California Academy of Sciences, Wild Oakland and the Oakland Museum of California, participants armed with smartphones photographed plants and animals from all around the lake....

Climate change is driving the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, which is contributing to sea level rise. But imagine that the same amount of water melting from Greenland each year is being lost in California and the rest of the West because of the epic drought there. What happens? The land in the West begins to rise. In fact, some parts of California’s mountains have been uplifted as much as 15 millimeters (about 0....

Editor’s Note: Excerpted from Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930, by Beatrix Hoffman, by arrangement with the University of Chicago Press. Copyright © Beatrix Hoffman, 2012. During the national debate over health care in September 2009, former U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claimed that reforms proposed by the Obama administration would bring “rationing” into the American medical system. Democratic proposals would “empower unelected bureaucrats to make decisions affecting life or death health-care matters,” Palin warned....