DNA-based switches could be used in diagnosis and treatment of diseases. (p. 11)

Time after time, physicists have tried to explain time. Many claim to have succeeded. But they haven’t. Otherwise everybody would quit trying to explain it all over again. One of the most recent such efforts comes from the mathematician/cosmologist George F.R. Ellis. He thinks solving the time mystery involves figuring out the difference between the past and the future. That’s not as obvious as it sounds. Physical laws governing motion make no distinction between future and past. Equations describing the scattering of billiard balls on a pool table work equally well if all the balls retr...

A new program mines mobile provider records for suspicious patterns. (p. 15)

Depending on your age, the word troll might evoke a nasty creature who lives under a bridge — or a nasty creature who posts inflammatory comments online. The former, found mostly in Scandinavian folktales, is typically a dim-witted beast, not inclined to help humans. The latter (judgment on wits aside) is also rarely considered helpful. But new research suggests a more nefarious role for these postmodern trolls: Their uncivil, rancorous remarks can influence how readers perceive science. Social scientists have long studied how and whether argumentative, obnoxious talk may influence peop...

With data from thousands of volunteers, researchers connect social media activity to personal traits. (p. 14)

Fight Club had its First Rule (don’t talk about Fight Club). The Transporter enforces Rule Number 1 (never change the deal). And NCIS Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs observes Rule 1 (never mix the suspects together in the same room). Physics has the second law of thermodynamics. It’s weird when you think about it. Movies and TV shows always give their prime rule top billing. But the physics rule alleged by Sir Arthur Eddington to hold the “supreme position among the laws of Nature” is only Number 2. Nevertheless, scientists generally consider it the most unbreakable law of all. It i...

Signals transmitted from one animal to another seem to share information, but usefulness of findings questioned.

Science is not a democracy. Nature’s laws are not subject to the whims of popular vote. A scientific theory succeeds by providing logical explanations for puzzling phenomena and making correct predictions about the outcomes of new experiments. It doesn’t matter how many scientists believed in the theory beforehand (or even afterward, for that matter). In fact, revolutionary new theories are seldom very popular. As Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, once noted, sometimes a theory doesn’t get widely accepted until its opponents die. Nevertheless, in certain scientific matters it�...