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A widely criticized experiment last year saw a researcher in China delete a gene in twin girls at the embryonic stage in an attempt to protect them from HIV. A new study suggests that using a drug to delete the same gene in people with stroke or traumatic brain injuries could help improve their recovery. The new work shows the benefits of turning off the gene in stroke-induced mice by using the drug, already approved as an HIV treatment....

Watching a fellow human jump into the air, spin three times and land on a thin piece of steel—all the while balancing on slippery ice—is an awe-inspiring experience. Figure skaters execute their routines so elegantly, they make it look easy—an illusion that quickly dissolves with our own trepid first step in an ice rink. Clinging to the side walls for dear life, feet stinging from the awkward display of ice walking, first-time ice skaters can barely skate in a straight line, let alone balance on one foot....

Microplastics—minuscule bits of bottles, bags, synthetic fibers and other plastic waste that have broken up in the environment—are influencing Earth’s climate as they circulate through the atmosphere. Like other aerosol particles, both natural and synthetic, microplastics seem to have an overall cooling effect (albeit a small one), according to the first study to look at the possible climate effects of airborne microplastics. The study’s authors and other researchers say the findings, published on Wednesday in Nature, show the urgent need to get a better handle on how much plastic debris is in the air, where it is and what it is made of in order to better pin down its climatic influence....

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer, and because older people make up a greater share of the population in many places, including the U.S., it is on the rise. The main cause of skin cancer is exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays, but the risk varies greatly across the globe because of differences in skin pigmentation—which protects against skin cancer—and the amount of direct sunlight that regions receive....

“If galaxies are all moving apart at ever increasing speed, how can they collide?” —J. Gow, Fairfax, Va. Cosmologist Tamara Davis, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia and an associate of the Dark Cosmology Center in Denmark, brings together an answer: The dynamics of the universe are governed by competing forces whose influence varies with scale, so local forces can override universal forces in discrete regions. On scales larger than galaxy clusters, all galaxies are indeed moving apart at an ever increasing rate....

For decades, researchers have known that the electron and its antiparticle, the positron, can join together to form a short-lived, hydrogenlike atom dubbed positronium. Now scientists at the University of California, Riverside, have managed to get two positronium atoms to stick together to form a molecule—di-positronium. The researchers first collected some 20 million positrons in an electromagnetic trap. They then fired the positrons in an intense nanosecond-long burst onto a microscopic spot on a thin, porous silica film....

By Ed Yong of Nature magazineAvian H5N1 influenza viruses in the wild may be one small step away from spreading effectively between mammals. That is the sobering message from a controversial study by Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published online by Nature after months of debate about how to release the findings publicly.“After wanting to read it for so long, it was like eating again after fasting,” says Vincent Racaniello, a virologist at Columbia University in New York....

The promise of a hydrogen economy, which would lessen dependence on nonrenewable energy sources such as fossil fuels, hinges on the ability to produce and store large amounts of the clean-burning element. New results from experiments on a novel catalyst suggest that it can be used to coax hydrogen from water without the need for severe reaction conditions. “We have discovered a catalyst that can produce ready quantities of hydrogen without the need for extreme cold temperatures or high pressures, which are often required in other production and storage methods,” remarks Mahdi Abu-Omar of Purdue University....

Just two months after giving us a peek at its new Google Maps Web interface, Google has opened up the service to all. Formerly available on an invitation-only basis, the revamped desktop interface was made available to all Internet users on Tuesday. Google offered a preview of the completely overhauled service at the I/O 2013 developers conference in May. Related stories How to get new Google Maps features Google Maps 2....

As a member of an editorial team covering the international endeavor known as science, I often find myself on airplanes. Recently my seatmate was a bright young woman. She spoke passionately about her specialty areas of design and marketing and was also eager to hear about my career. “Science?” she asked. “Why would you write about that instead of, say, culture or design?” I was surprised by the question but quickly realized she was genuinely curious....

Doctors who transplant corneas have always thought of the vision-saving surgery as gender-neutral, but a new study in the U.K. has found that female patients do better if they get their new corneas from other women rather than men. The study of more than 18,000 patients in the U.K. found that female transplant recipients were more likely to have successful transplants if they got a woman’s cornea—but there was no gender difference in failure rates for men receiving women’s tissue....

You don’t have to worry about a soft drink spontaneously overflowing its rim or shooting up and out of the straw from which you’re trying to drink. That’s because soft drinks are nothing like the superfluid helium shown in this video. Researchers have known for decades that if you cool liquid helium just a few degrees below its boiling point of –452 degrees Fahrenheit (–269 degrees Celsius) it will suddenly be able to do things that other fluids can’t, like dribble through molecule-thin cracks, climb up and over the sides of a dish, and remain motionless when its container is spun....

THINGS GET WEIRD—spectacularly so—at the borderlands of physics. The rarefied realms described mathematically and sometimes glimpsed in experiments are all the more extraordinary for not being the mere products of someone’s hyperactive imagination. For instance, string theory’s equations imply that the universe contains six extra dimensions, which are too tiny to have yet been detected. Some physicists also see innumerable theoretical universes in their equations. In their article “The String Theory Landscape,” starting on page 40, Raphael Bousso and Joseph Polchinski provide a view of a theoretical terrain populated with an array of such possible worlds....

Editor’s note: We are posting this feature from our February 2006 issue to commemorate the 50th anniversary this month of the Dalai Lama’s forced exile from China. Many years ago a curious boy looked through a telescope and, on seeing the shadows in the craters of the moon, realized that he had to make a choice. His religion taught him to respect the moon as a generator of light, but science taught him that the moon reflected the sun’s rays....

Have you heard about the “gender data gap”? I recently learned the phrase in an excerpt published in March in the Guardian from the book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, by Caroline Criado Perez (Abrams, 2019). “The gender data gap,” explains Criado Perez, “is both a cause and a consequence of the type of unthinking that conceives of humanity as almost exclusively male.” With the world designed by men and for other men, being a woman actually can be a health hazard....

No Relief from Tsunami Threat In the devastating wake of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, scientists rushed to investigate its cause and the potential for another killer wave [see “Tsunami: Wave of Change”; SciAm, January 2006]. They found that the tsunami resulted from a magnitude 9.2 earthquake off Sumatra’s western coast—specifically, at the Sunda megathrust, where one tectonic plate is diving below another. Scientists had conjectured two strong earthquakes there in 2007 might have relieved pent-up energy, thereby preventing another major quake....

Consider two questions. First: Who are you? What makes you different from your peers, in terms of the things you buy, the clothes you wear, and the car you drive (or refuse to)? What makes you unique in terms of your basic psychological make-up—the part of you that makes you do the things you do, say the things you say, and feel the things you feel? And the second question: How do you use the internet?...

In 1960 a young astronomer named Frank Drake trained a radio dish in Green Bank, W.Va., on two nearby stars and listened, for weeks, to the noise of their radio emanations. He was engaged in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. Fifty years later, SETI scientists following in Drake’s footsteps can do in seconds what took Drake 200 hours, thanks to continual boosts in instrumental and computing power. At this rate, Drake and his SETI Institute colleague Seth Shostak estimate that in 20 or 30 years scientists will have scanned enough stars to have a decent chance of detecting an alien signal—if intelligent aliens are indeed out there....

Four years ago Amanda Wang, then 27 years old, was at a rehearsal dinner for a close friend. At the start of the evening, she felt content, eager to enjoy the wedding festivities. But shortly after she sat down to dinner, she was struck by “a tidal wave” of negative emotions. Her mind began to race with disturbing thoughts about her own marriage, which was unstable, and feelings of self-loathing. Suddenly, Wang says, it was as if someone had draped a heavy cloth over her, suffocating her and cutting her off from the conversation....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Most people don’t get to use the tree-climbing skills they perfected as children once they’re adults. But for Jochen Wolf, an evolutionary biologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, climbing trees is an essential part of his job. He regularly shimmies 60 feet up into the treetops, where he gingerly plucks fledgling crows from their nests and lowers them to his team below. Wolf’s climbing exploits have focused on two species of birds — carrion crows, which predominate in western Germany, and the closely related hooded crows that prevail further to the east, in Sweden and Poland....