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TEL AVIV, ISRAEL—Physicians for decades have grappled with ways to block further tissue damage in patients who suffer heart attacks. They have tried everything from drugs to cell therapy—all with little luck. But promising new research indicates that a biogel made from seaweed may have the healing powers that have thus far eluded them. The first clinical trial in humans recently began of an alginate-based biomaterial that, when injected into animals, helped their hearts repair themselves....

Life-size renditions of candies from King’s Candy Crush Saga. (Credit: Chester Ng/Facebook) Odds are that someone you know has a love or hate relationship with Candy Crush Saga, the seemingly never-ending game that’s become the fixation of people everywhere. The game is the undisputed leader in the casual-gaming sector, witnessing more than 600 million active game sessions each day from mobile devices alone. The runaway craze in Facebook gaming was released on the social network in April 2012 and became the fourth most popular Facebook game before it landed on iOS and Android in late November of last year....

The Himalayas distort Earth’s contour only about as much as a human hair would that of a billiard ball. Discerning such a minuscule bump on a planet orbiting a distant star might seem laughably impossible, but two astronomers have proposed a way to detect mountains and other surface features on exoplanets. Finding mountains could help address another key question: Can these planets hold life? So says astronomy graduate student Moiya McTier of Columbia University, one of the co-authors of the proposal, which was published in April in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society....

Solutions: 1. They must all be 20. Any of the other statistics would reveal this fact for sure. 2. The mean would be enough to determine how many 20s and how many 21s there are. For example, if there are four 20s and three 21s, then the mean would be about 20.4. Knowing the median would not be enough because a median of 20 for example could result in a situation in which there are three 20s and four 21s or five 20s and two 21s....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineThirty years after AIDS was first recognized as a human scourge, major recent gains in treatment and prevention risk being derailed by the global financial crisis.On 23 November, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced that it will not fund new grants for prevention and treatment until 2014, owing to “substantial budget challenges in some donor countries”. The fund’s HIV activities run the gamut from counseling and testing pregnant women in India to providing medications to infected children in Kenya....

“Feeling down,” “Feeling irritable,” “Trouble getting up in the morning?” “Depression hurts,” “Drug X can help,” “Speak to your doctor about Drug X.” These 60-second appeals are an ubiquitous part of the U.S. television experience. This is because, in the U.S., pharmaceutical companies can lawfully market prescription medications to the public through direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. Critics have charged that doctors should decide prescription medications without being influenced by patient requests. Citing their proliferation as the main culprit for increasing patient demand for advertised drugs, the American Medical Association has advocated for a ban on DTC ads....

Astronomers have observed Jupiter for centuries. But a study that looks at the gas giant as if it were an exoplanet could help to make more reliable interpretations of the atmospheres of bodies orbiting stars hundreds of light years away. The results largely confirm the conventional picture of Jupiter, but also reveal some surprises—including clouds of ice crystals previously unheard of on the planet. The hundreds of planets now known to orbit stars other than our own are almost never directly visible in telescopes....

Doctors have implanted bio-engineered tracheas in patients, and researchers have experimented with growing bladders and kidneys. Now, another organ joins that list: the esophagus, which brings food and water to the stomach. An international team of scientists working at Kuban State Medical University in Krasnodar, Russia, has built a working esophagus from stem cells, and implanted the organ into rats, the researchers say. The new esophagus functioned just as well as the rats’ natural organs, said the researchers, who detailed their work today (April 15) in the journal Nature Communications....

The water began turning a barely perceptible brownish-green in early May, a sign that algae were present and growing in the waters of Monterey Bay. By the end of month, Raphael Kudela, a professor of ocean sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his team, who run a regional algae monitoring project, were measuring some of the highest levels of the neurotoxin domoic acid ever observed in the region....

In June Scientific American launched its Great Consciousness Contest intended to get readers involved in testing an idea put forward by leading neuroscientists Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi. Their article in SA’s June issue, “A Test for Consciousness,” postulates that slight variations in the placement of objects that occupy ordinary everyday images can completely befuddle the most sophisticated image-recognition capabilities of today’s computers. Only a fully conscious machine could deduce that something is not right with this type of image....

Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibilityby Ellen J. Langer Random House, 2009 (($25))When she was in her 20s, Harvard University psychologist Ellen J. Langer fainted occasionally, and doctors said she might have epilepsy. She decided to take the matter into her own hands, mentally “catching” herself sooner and sooner when she felt faint, until the fainting disappeared. That empowering experience set the tone for her remarkable 30-year career, much of which she has spent figuring out how to help people take almost miraculous control over their lives....

Vertebrate animals come in all shapes and sizes. But some have evolved truly bizarre forms. With beaks instead of teeth and shells formed by the ribs and other bits, turtles surely rank among the strangest of our backboned brethren. Indeed, paleontologists have long puzzled over how turtles acquired their odd traits and who their closest relatives are. Previously, much of what researchers knew about turtle origins derived from fossils of Proganochelys from Germany....

“Nothing shows that Neandertals didn’t have language abilities,” says Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Indeed, the recent finding by Krause and his colleagues that Neandertals and humans have the same version of the gene FOXP2—the only gene linked to language so far—might be thought of as evidence that they did. But although studies of modern humans suggest that FOXP2 is necessary for speech, no one believes that it is sufficient....

The People’s Climate March may end up being the biggest protest to urge action to restrain global warming yet. The march in New York City on September 21 is predicted to draw more than 100,000 people, which would top the tens of thousands who showed up in Copenhagen back in 2009. But how many scientists, whether they study climate change or not, will be there? The idea of the march—first proposed by writer and activist Bill McKibben of 350....

We stood around the body planning our autopsy strategy. A scalpel, we realized, was not going to be the appropriate implement for this corpse, so we made our decision. It took all three of us to muscle the slippery black bulk of the pilot whale into the screaming blur of the band-saw blade. The whale had died of natural causes, after a distinguished military tenure conducting deep-sea operations for the U....

At first glance—and numerous subsequent ones—the folks in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) certainly seem extraordinary. Researchers chose study participants by giving junior high schoolers the SAT, a test designed for college-bound high-school students. For the vast majority of the kids, the math section would have included disciplines they had never even heard of: algebra, geometry, trigonometry. Researchers recruited only kids who scored among the top 1 percent in the U....

As Great Britain finds itself in the clutches of an extreme weather event, its scientists are inching closer to attributing this winter’s unusual spate of floods and storms to climate change. As usual, however, they are moving cautiously. “In terms of the storms and floods of winter 2013/2014, it is not possible, yet, to give a definitive answer on whether climate change has been a contributor or not,” concluded the United Kingdom’s Met Office in a lengthy report published this week....

Bulging disks, fragile bones, fractured hips, torn ligaments, varicose veins, cataracts, hearing loss, hernias and hemorrhoids: the list of bodily malfunctions that plague us as we age is long and all too familiar. Why do we fall apart just as we reach what should be the prime of life? The living machines we call our bodies deteriorate because they were not designed for extended operation and because we now push them to function long past their warranty period....

Carcasses of adult crocodiles do not usually signal the return of winter in South Africa, but mass death seems to be becoming the harbinger of the season. Rangers at the Kruger National Park have found Nile crocodiles floating in the Oli­fants River or bloated and decaying along its banks. Investigators are rushing to figure out the cause and worry that the deaths might be signaling the presence of toxins or pathogens that could threaten not only the croc population but also the livelihoods of the people living near the river....

As editor in chief and senior vice president, I’ve given talks to a range of audiences about why science is important to humanity’s future wellbeing. But Thursday, July 17, was not the typical discussion: I was privileged to join three science experts as witnesses at the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing, “The Federal Research Portfolio: Capitalizing on Investments in R&D.” The hearing considered the federal government’s role in research and development (R&D), and the nation’s STEM education and outreach initiatives....