That year, biologists Linda Buck and Richard Axel published a seminal paper; they discovered about 1,000 genes that code for about 1,000 olfactory receptors in mice, and they showed that those receptors are the beginning of a mammal’s sense of smell. Each receptor, their research showed, is uniquely primed to react to a few different molecules, and our noses sense distinct odors when many receptors fire at the same time. Inspired by Buck and Axel, who won the Nobel Prize in 2004 for their work, Mershin and other scientists conceived of odors as simply lists of molecules.

In fact, the main sounds of particle accelerators come from all of the machinery: engines designed to keep components at cryogenic temperatures, fans whirring in supercomputing sensors, and water rushing through pipes to keep electronics cool. Quenches do happen—most notably, the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland experienced a much-publicized quench in 2008, when six tons of liquid helium vented into the LHC tunnel and damaged 53 magnets. The quench might be the most notable sound, but Harding explained that there plenty of other noises that a particle physicist becomes familiar with.

Using mapping of ash deposits near and far from Cerro Blanco, Fernandez-Turiel and others estimate this eruption may have dumped over 100 km3 of volcanic debris (and possibly as high as 175 km3) on the landscape. Now, we don’t think they are on the same scale as Cerro Blanco or Ilopango, but they could easily rival Pinatubo in 1991 and the possible source of these eruptions is ~10-15 kilometers from Bend, Oregon. MORE ABOUT: Argentina,
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When the Toronto Raptors’ Kawhi Leonard got the ball with 4.2 seconds left in a tied Game 7, it didn’t look like he’d get a good shot off. (Did the league use a special ball made of metal on the last possession, or is the ball made of metal all the time and the rim magnets were activated for Kawhi’s shot? Magee agreed with the physicists: “The trajectory of the shot, because he had to go over Embiid, caused the ball to go maybe a bit higher than he normally shoots, and the ball came down on a descending arc.

Research chemist Ed Dlugokencky and his colleagues in the Global Monitoring Division catalog the canisters, and then use a series of high-precision tools — a gas chromatograph, a flame ionization detector, sophisticated software — to measure how much carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane each flask contains. As it happens, they are also the biggest source of uncertainty when it comes to the carbon budget, according to Benjamin Poulter, a NASA researcher and contributor to the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists that publishes one of the most widely cited estimates of the global methane budget. Only three elements of the global methane budget are large enough to be plausible culprits: microbial emissions (from livestock, agriculture, and wetlands); fossil fuel emissions; and the chemical process by which methane is scrubbed from the atmosphere.

Bloomberg reporter Tom Randall revisited the memos in light of the world’s new carbon dioxide milestone and tweeted a graph from one showing just how much Exxon knew what our future would look like. It’s eerie seeing how well the company understood both climate science and the world’s patterns of economic growth built on the back of fossil fuels. Here’s that chart, annotated for ease of reading:
Red lines show where Exxon thought the world’s carbon dioxide levels and temperatures would be at around 2019.

By linking brain activity to an image or sound in real time, we can use simple game-like techniques to get people to train themselves to forge new neural connections and voluntarily adopt (or avoid) certain mental states. Using fMRI, researchers can create a map of an individual’s neural activity while thinking of a particular concept, such as ‘a spider’; by finding this brain pattern for people with phobias, researchers are then able to reduce the need for exposure during treatment. In the early days of neurofeedback, researchers would place this cap on a participant’s head and offer pleasant tones or a happy face on a screen whenever the read-out yielded brainwaves that would result in a positive clinical effect.

The as-of-yet-unnamed project is the brainchild of independent dream researcher Daniel Oldis and represents a continuation of a question he and others in his field began exploring decades ago: Are dreams learning experiences, and can behaviors in waking life be influenced by what people dream about? While this was important information, it became newly relevant to Oldis in 2014, when he read about researchers in Japan who were capturing images from dreams using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In addition to conducting those experiments, Oldis has compiled a team of nearly two dozen dream researchers, neurobiologists, sleep scientists, and psychologists (which he calls “the dream team”) from academic institutions and organizations across the country — including the UCLA School of Medicine, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and more — to put all the components together and create the first dream movie.

Holst, an undergraduate at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, in South Africa, was participating in a project in which students search through local soil samples for new phages—viruses that infect and kill bacteria. Samples of Muddy and the other phage viruses made their way to the lab of Graham Hatfull, a phage expert at the University of Pittsburgh. The London team, led by the pediatrician Helen Spencer, had been treating a 15-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis—a genetic disorder that leads to persistent lung infections.

Physicists have been after superionic ice for years — ever since a primitive computer simulation led by Pierfranco Demontis in 1988 predicted water would take on this strange, almost metal-like form if you pushed it beyond the map of known ice phases. Inside Uranus and Neptune, then, fluid layers might stop about 8,000 kilometers down into the planet, where an enormous mantle of sluggish, superionic ice like Millot’s team produced begins. Other planets and moons in the solar system likely don’t host the right interior sweet spots of temperature and pressure to allow for superionic ice.