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By Jo Marchant of Nature magazineIn a secluded stretch of desert about 300 kilometers south of Cairo, hundreds of bodies lie buried in the sand. Wrapped in linen and rolled up in stiff mats made of sticks, they are little more than bones. But their ornate plaited hair styles and simple personal possessions help to reveal details about the individuals in each grave. The bodies date from around 3,300 years ago, when the Pharaoh Akhenaten renounced Egypt’s traditional polytheistic religion and moved his capital to remote Amarna, to worship just one god: the Sun disc Aten....

Many of India’s nearly 400,000 blind children are confined to a lifetime of poverty and abuse. Blindness in some of these children, a result of cataracts, can be corrected through surgery. In the July Scientific American Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientist Pawan Sinha recounts how these surgeries let blind children see for the first time. This effort, Project Prakash, has provided a new understanding of how late in life a child can develop vision....

A substantial number of children with cancer carry cancer-predisposing mutations inherited from a parent, according to a new study published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers examined the genes of more than a thousand children with cancer and found that 8.5 percent of them—most of whom had little family history of cancer—carry handed-down gene mutations that make them more susceptible to the disease. The figure might seem small, especially within a relatively rare diagnosis, but its implications are large—for the young patients and for their family members who might also be at risk—and could help doctors select more appropriate treatments....

A survey of 704 species of coral—tiny polyps with hard shells, some of which form spectacular underwater reefs—has found that nearly 33 percent of them face a greater threat of becoming extinct as the globe warms. The main culprits, according to the study published today in Science: bleaching—when corals expel the algae that normally feeds them and gives them color—as well as disease outbreaks in coral weakened by warming sea-surface temperatures....

Billions of particles of invisible “dark matter” are probably flying through your body right now, passing through the spaces between your atoms without a trace. According to conventional thinking, these particles should be somewhat less abundant during the winter and should peak around June 1. But a new study suggests this calculation is way off; the real peak is at the beginning of March. Dark matter is thought to constitute almost 27 percent of the universe’s total mass and energy, but its nature is a mystery....

By Nichola GroomLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The oil and gas industry is finding that less is more in the push to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing. Slightly dirty water, it seems, does just as good a job as crystal clear when it comes to making an oil or gas well work.Exploration and production companies are under pressure to reduce the amount of freshwater used in dry areas like Texas and to cut the high costs of hauling millions of barrels of water to oil and gas wells and later to underground disposal wells....

Dark matter is thought to make up some five sixths of all matter in the universe. Yet incredibly sophisticated projects ranging from the most powerful atom smasher ever built to vats of chilly liquid xenon have failed to find a trace of it. But now some scientists are hoping atomic clocks, the most precise timekeepers ever made, could be used to help explain this elusive phenomenon. Many physicists believe dark matter is an invisible substance whose predicted gravitational effects on known matter would help explain a variety of cosmic mysteries, such as why galaxies can spin as fast as they do without flying apart....

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? worries the classical Roman maxim: “Who watches the watchmen?” But in point of fact, the security vendors who stand guard over today’s networked information systems are under considerable scrutiny from their competitors, their customers, hackers and, increasingly often, governments concerned about national security. Scientific American’s editor in chief John Rennie sat down in Palo Alto, Calif., this past May with representatives from the security industry—and from some of the industries that will rely on the protections they provide—to discuss the challenges they will confront....

Conspiracy theories and scientific theories attempt to explain the world around us. Both apply a filter of logic to the complexity of the universe, thereby transforming randomness into reason. Yet these two theoretical breeds differ in important ways. Scientific theories, by definition, must be falsifiable. That is, they must make reliable predictions about the world; and if those predictions turn out to be incorrect, the theory can be declared false. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are tough to disprove....

Cognition-Boosting Compounds It’s news chocolate lovers have been craving: raw cocoa may be packed with brain-boosting compounds. Researchers at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, with scientists from Mars, Inc., and their colleagues published findings last September that suggest cognitive function in the elderly is improved by ingesting high levels of natural compounds found in cocoa called flavanols. The study included 90 individuals with mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease....

An octopus nestles under a rock, but she’s still within reach of the shark following her scent. The shark bites down on one of her arms and rolls over again and again, twisting the limb trapped between its jaws until it detaches. The shark swims away with the arm in its mouth, spitting out sand and rocks acquired in the scuffle. Where her arm used to be, the octopus has a stub of bright-white flesh....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It’s not every day my Twitter feed is full of people talking about flat-tops, squeezing and injections, but then Wednesday 3 June was not an average day for the Large Hadron Collider. The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator and lies in a tunnel below CERN, the European physics lab just outside Geneva....

If you are pregnant or know anyone who is pregnant, you have almost certainly heard of Listeria, a dangerous bacterium that contaminates vegetables, dairy and meat. It is something you want to avoid: Listeria infections kill about 500 people a year in the U.S., and 2,000 more become seriously ill with food poisoning. Pregnant women are about 20 times more likely to become infected. So it might surprise you that scientists want to inject patients who have HIV and cancer with the bacterium, whose scientific name is Listeria monocytogenes....

This is a great week for planetary observers. Mercury is in its best position as a “morning star” for observers in the Northern Hemisphere while Jupiter is at its biggest and brightest for nighttime observers all over the world. First let’s take a look at Mercury’s dawn sky performance. Because Mercury never strays far from the sun, it is usually a challenging object to observe. Only rarely does Mercury reach maximum elongation when the ecliptic is at a steep angle to the horizon, so that it can be spotted against a fairly dark sky....

With world leaders meeting at the international climate change conference in Glasgow to negotiate urgent global action necessary to meet this greatest of challenges, many people still don’t know what must be done. Ever since the “code red” report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this August, many people have been feeling shell-shocked. In addition to bringing a serious dose of reality to those who don’t keep up with the latest advances in climate science, the most important message of the report is that it is not too late to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act rapidly and decisively to cut the emissions that are warming our planet....

It’s been more than two months since the House of Representatives passed the Build Back Better Act—a bill that would make desperately needed and decades-overdue strides toward the U.S. meeting its moral responsibility to combat the climate crisis. But instead of moving into a new year on the hope that would come with the Senate passing and President Biden signing this historic legislation into law, I’m terrified—and furious—that we’re tripping at the finish line....

For decades the cynical observer could be forgiven for viewing Microsoft as a giant copying machine. The inspiration for just about every major Microsoft initiative can be traced back to a successful predecessor: Windows (Macintosh), Internet Explorer (Netscape), Bing (Google), Zune (iPod). But in late 2012 Microsoft broke from the pack. It made a billion-dollar gamble that personal computing is taking a new direction. The gamble was Windows 8, and the direction is touch....

Twenty-one weeks into her pregnancy Brook Meakins and her husband started to regret their “babymoon”—a vacation celebrating just the two of them before their burgeoning family grew to three. Right before Christmas they had left for a luxurious trip to Bora Bora that they had planned well in advance. From there they went to Easter Island for another week and then decided to swing back through Bora Bora for a few more days....

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking (The Cooking Lab, 2011) is a six-volume, 2,348-page work that relies heavily on photography and illustrations to make the science and technology of modern cooking accessible and engaging to everyone from science buffs to professional chefs. One of our goals in producing the book, by inventor and physicist Nathan Myhrvold, along with co-authors Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, was to give readers insight into what happens inside food as it cooks....

MELNIKOVO, RUSSIA—To properly treat tuberculosis (TB), you must take up to four antibiotics every day for six months under careful supervision. If you are one of the 17 stricken individuals in this small farming community, you can get that care either at the clinic–hospital in the town center or one of the newly opened satellite clinics in outlying neighborhoods. But none of those were accessible to 85-year-old Lubov Potaskaeva, who lives in a rundown apartment complex for agricultural laborers far from town....