(Credit: Africa Studio/Shutterstock) The search for a suitable male contraceptive has been long and mostly fruitless. Though ideas ranging from hormonal treatments to plugs inserted into the vas deferens have been proposed, none has yet made it to market, and men still rely on either condoms or vasectomies to prevent unwanted pregnancies. A new method interferes with genes responsible for creating new sperm, which could be a more attractive approach. Snipping out a gene that regulate ...read more

Today artificial neural networks are making art, writing speeches, identifying faces and even driving cars. It feels as if we’re riding the wave of a novel technological era, but the current rise in neural networks is actually a renaissance of sorts. It may be hard to believe, but artificial intelligence researchers were already beginning to see the promise in neural networks during World War II in their mathematical models. But by the 1970s, the field was ready to give up on them entirel ...read more

It’s Nobel time: Committees traditionally announce the recipients throughout the month of October. In honor of this year’s winners, let’s take a look at some stats on laureates of bygone years. (This data excludes information related to peace, literature and economic sciences prizes.) ...read more

And millions of lives may be at risk. Just 10 kilometers from the frenetic pulse of central Naples, in stark contrast to the Italian city’s impressive volcanic-stone churches and effortlessly stylish urbanites, sits a boxy, concrete building. Inside this unremarkable government outpost, accessed through a pair of sliding glass doors, is the Vesuvius Observatory monitoring room, lit by the cool glow of 92 flat-panel screens. On each screen, volcanic activity readings, including those f ...read more

As a young biologist studying how wounds heal, Min Zhao found that he could quicken cellular repairs by exposing an injury to electricity. But the process remained enigmatic until an experiment by one of his graduate students failed to achieve the desired result. The more that new tissue drew toward the current on one side of the wound, the more the other side recoiled. What the student had accidentally found, according to Zhao, is that current directs the movement of cells, and the effect is so ...read more

Experts are uncovering millennia of history under a Turkish megacity’s outskirts. When Sengül Aydıngün first started surveying the shores of Küçükçekmece Lake in the western suburbs of Istanbul, colleagues doubted she’d find any evidence of ancient human settlement; other researchers had already surveyed the area and hadn’t turned up much. But the area’s geography and water resources looked favorable for early habitation, and he ...read more

A 37-year-old man’s sudden lapse into mania and paranoia eludes diagnosis until a final clue emerges. Kurt, like many patients brought to the psychiatric emergency room, arrived at the hospital in handcuffs. “We’ve got a streaker,” said the triage nurse. On a cold December evening, something sent this 37-year-old man running naked through the streets. Kurt had argued with the staff at the rental office in his apartment complex. When they threatened to evict him if he ...read more

Gene Therapy for Muscular Dystrophy We’re one step closer to treating Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a severe type of the degenerative disorder that breaks down a person’s musculature. The inherited condition, most common in boys, results from a lack of dystrophin, a protein that’s essential for healthy muscles. An international team of experts developed an injection that restored the function of dystophin-expressing genes in 12 golden retrievers. The dogs saw a significant rever ...read more

I don’t remember my first language anymore, or at least not most of it. When I was 2, I immigrated with my family into the United States from South India, and we all spoke Tamil. I didn’t know any English before I started school, so when my teachers noticed I was behind, my parents decided to stop speaking to me in Tamil. This was a common approach in the 1980s. Now, educators are more aware of the value of bilingualism. I haven’t completely lost my connection to it. I still he ...read more