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The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The Food and Drug Administration expanded emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to include adolescents 12 to 15 years of age on May 10, 2021. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention followed with recommendations endorsing use in this age group after their advisory group meeting on May 12. The American Academy of Pediatrics also supports this decision....

Store managers and psychologists have long believed that outgoing individuals make the best salespeople. Yet research now suggests that extroverts are actually less successful at making sales than people with more moderate social temperaments. Adam Grant, associate professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, gave personality tests to 340 salespeople and compared their extroversion scores to their yearly revenue. Those who scored exactly halfway between the poles of extreme extroversion and extreme introversion—whom Grant calls “ambiverts”—earned 24 percent more than the introverts and, surprisingly, 32 percent more than the extroverts....

The story of the motor vehicle follows the development of the internal combustion engine. Early cars had been designed around bulky steam engines. Electric motors were (and are) sometimes used as a motive power. But the development of cheap, efficient, easy to use, lightweight gasoline-powered engines drove the development of the motor vehicle and its growth as an integral part of the modern world. There was a steadily growing demand for cars, trucks, their components and their fuel....

Dan Ariely is a behavioral economist at the Massachusetts Intitute of Technology and author of the best-selling book, Predictably Irrational (HarperCollins, 2008). In recent years, he has demonstrated that random digits can influence bids in an auction, that sexual arousal leads to reckless decisions (at least in college males) and that brand-name aspirin is more effective at treating headaches than generic aspirin, even when the pills are identical. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Ariely about his research....

Robert Heinsohn, professor of evolutionary biology at the Australian National University, explains. Males are more colorful or ornamented than females in most, but not all, bird species. Understanding this phenomenon requires a basic grasp of the evolutionary forces that shape the behavior and morphology of individuals and species. Charles Darwin developed much of the theory that helps explain this. He proposed that traits promoting survival in individuals are favored by the process of natural selection, whereas traits that help the individuals of just one sex (usually the males) compete for mates are favored by sexual selection....

All life on Earth is based on carbon. This element moves through the atmosphere, oceans and the planet’s crust in a pattern called the carbon cycle. Humans and other life on Earth are part of this cycle — for instance, we and other species live off nutrients made with carbon, such as sugars, fats and proteins, and also exhale carbon dioxide and emit the gas with our cars and factories....

When the National Institutes of Health convened a panel of independent experts this past April on how to prevent Alzhei­mer’s disease, the conclusions were pretty grim. The panel determined that “no evidence of even moderate scientific quality” links anything—from herbal or nutritional supplements to prescription medications to social, economic or environmental conditions—with the slightest decrease in the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Furthermore, the committee argued, there is little credible evidence that you can do anything to delay the kinds of memory problems that are often associated with aging....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. University of Maryland are filling out their brackets to predict the winners and losers in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. While most people use a strategy to guide their picks – such as relying on advanced basketball knowledge or identifying the cutest mascot – this Maryland method relies on quantum physics. David Hucul, a graduate student, came up with the idea....

For coastal communities in the United States, the path to confronting souring seas can likely be found close to home in their very own backyards. In fact, according to a recent study co-authored by several current and former Stanford researchers, there are several local and regional actions—many of which are not too costly—that can be taken to accelerate the adaptation to ocean acidification. “We think of ocean acidification as being controlled by carbon dioxide, and it is, but there are a lot of different things humans do that affect the chemical equilibrium of the carbonate system in the coastal zone,” said Aaron Strong, lead author of the study and a graduate student in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources....

A study of Chinese and American students has found that the two groups looked at scenes in photographs in distinct ways. The findings indicate that previously observed cultural differences in judgment and memory between East Asians and North Americans derive from differences in what they actually see. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that whereas North Americans tend to be more analytic when evaluating a scenario, fixating on the focal object, East Asians are generally more holistic, giving more consideration to the context....

For millennia, humans have met their demise through violence, accidents and a fearsome array of infectious diseases. In 1900, the leading causes of death in the United States were pneumonia, influenza and tuberculosis. A century later, they are heart disease and cancer. Antibiotics and other modern medicines have reduced the lethality of the microbial illnesses that killed our ancestors. Still, we all die of something. So we now find lying in wait for us scores of disorders characterized by the uncontrolled growth of cells....

More hints of dark matter have emerged from the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS), which hunts for the theorized particles from the depths of a mine in Minnesota. Eight silicon detectors recorded three events that may represent collisions from weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Physicists have found hints of the existence of WIMPs before, but they remain elusive. Two other possible detections from the CDMS search, reported in 2010, turned out to be indistinguishable from background collisions from other, non-WIMP, sources....

On May 29, 1919, two British expeditions, positioned on opposite sides of the planet, aimed telescopes at the sun during a total eclipse. Their mission: to test a radical theory of gravity dreamed up by a former patent clerk, who predicted that passing starlight should bend toward the sun. Their results, announced that November, vaulted Albert Einstein into the public consciousness and confirmed one of the most spectacular experimental successes in the history of science....

A cyclonic circulation swirled over Boulder, Colo., in September 2013 and drew a river of moisture from the Pacific Ocean off Mexico’s coast. It dumped rain on the people below for five days. In that month alone, Boulder received more than half the precipitation it gets in an entire year. Saturated soils refused the water. It fell down mountainsides and roared through towns. Searching for an appropriate superlative, the National Weather Service called the storm “biblical....

Eye drops often provide quick relief to those suffering from minor eye problems such as redness, itching and dryness, but doctors have found that such dollops of medicine do not work very well for more serious conditions such as glaucoma, chronic dry-eye and corneal ulcers. Help may be on the way for those suffering from these or other ocular ailments in the form of a contact lens that sandwiches medicine between two layers of polymer film and administers large doses of medication at constant rates over extended periods....

With the 2008 presidential election only a year away, the merits of each candidate are becoming a common topic of conversation. But how do our brains, after hearing so many different opinions, gauge the popularity of each one? New research findings suggest that we judge a viewpoint’s prevalence by how familiar it is—regardless of whether we have heard it five times from one person or once each from five different people....

The discovery of yet another period of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals is adding to the growing sense that sexual encounters among different ancient human species were commonplace throughout their history. “As more early modern humans and archaic humans are found and sequenced, we’re going to see many more instances of interbreeding,” says Sergi Castellano, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His team discovered the latest example, which they believe occurred around 100,000 years ago, by analysing traces of Homo sapiens DNA in a Neanderthal genome extracted from a toe bone found in a cave in Siberia....

Humans are not the only species that deals with harassment. According to new research, female cockroaches may cluster together to keep male suitors at bay. Christina Stanley, an animal behavior lecturer at the University of Chester in England, and her colleagues put Pacific beetle cockroaches in special containers to observe their social behavior. The roaches would gather in primarily female groups and jostle out the males. “Female [roaches] created this better social environment by excluding the males,” says Stanley, who led the study published online in July in Ethology....

The detection of extra dimensions beyond the familiar four—the three dimensions of space and one of time—would be among the most earth-shattering discoveries in the history of physics. Now scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., are designing a new experiment that would investigate tantalizing hints that extra dimensions may indeed exist. Last year researchers involved in Fermilab’s MiniBooNE study, which detects elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos, announced that they had found a surprising anomaly....

The disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in March released far more radiation than the Japanese government has claimed. So concludes a study1 that combines radioactivity data from across the globe to estimate the scale and fate of emissions from the shattered plant. The study also suggests that, contrary to government claims, pools used to store spent nuclear fuel played a significant part in the release of the long-lived environmental contaminant caesium-137, which could have been prevented by prompt action....