A well-polished mirror reflects the world faithfully back to the viewer’s eyes. But break that mirror into billions of nanosized chunks and each tiny silver sliver would not reflect the world with such fidelity. Instead of bouncing back to the viewer, the light would be sucked into the surface of the nanochunk like a genie into a bottle. When it hits the surface of a scrap of metal, light can set off a wave in the free electrons hanging out on the metal’s surface. This wave carries the light along like a surfer riding on an electron sea. The light-and-electron hybrid is called a surfac... (p. 26)

The brain shows slightly different, but overlapping patterns when processing digits and dots of the same value.

Fossils of new species suggest peculiar features weren’t limited to the biggest dinosaurs (p. 12)

On the outside, people’s right and left sides look pretty much the same. On the inside, though, such superficial symmetry gives way to an imbalanced array of organs: The heart, spleen and stomach sit on the left side of the body, while the liver and pancreas take up the right. Even organs that at first glance appear as perfect mirror images of each other, such as the kidneys, lungs and testicles, turn out to have telltale left-right differences. Figuring out how a body with such internal asymmetry develops from an egg (and later an embryo) with near-perfect symmetry has long stymied deve... (p. 26)

A rare species of coral algae exploded in population when ocean temperatures increased, a new study shows.

Under ultraviolet light, rings around the brown spots in aging bananas may signal the transition from ripe to rotten, researchers say.

Man-made music inspired by tamarin calls seems to alter the primates’ emotions, a new study suggests. (p. 10)

Scientists find new genes for antibiotic resistance in common bacteria in the human gut. (p. 13)

High levels of leptin may tell mother hamsters to invest in larger litters, a new study suggests. (p. 14)

You are hiking in the mountains when, out of the corner of your eye, you see something suspiciously snakelike. You freeze and look more carefully, this time identifying the source of your terror: a stick. Yet you could have sworn it was a snake. The brain may play tricks, but in this case it was actually doing you a favor. The context — a mountain trail — was right for a snake. So your brain was primed to see one. And the stick was sufficiently snakelike to make your brain jump to a visual conclusion. But it turns out emotions are involved here, too. A fear of snakes means tha... (p. 22)

Blind and sighted people’s brains sort the living from the nonliving in the same way, suggesting this ability may be hard-wired.

The Large Hadron Collider will begin colliding protons at half of the designed energy this November, with plans to repair the faulty sections of the accelerator at the end of 2010.

Scientists find newborn nerve cells in the intestines of adult mice, suggesting a new line of research for treating intestinal disorders. (p. 9)