The New Orleans Lakefront Airport was built by the Louisiana governor Huey P. Long on a tongue of fill that sticks out into Lake Pontchartrain. Its terminal was designed by the same architect Long had used to build a new Louisiana state capitol and a new governor’s mansion, and it was originally named for one of Long’s cronies, Abraham Shushan. In the last seven thousand years, the river has avulsed six times, and each time it has set about laying down a new bulge of land.

Some believe that the discovery might herald a new category for how quantum particles interact and behave — one that defies physicists’ assumptions that such a system follows an inexorable march toward thermalization. “The available quantum system can exist in so many possible states that it would be extremely hard for them to come back and find where they came from,” said Zlatko Papić, a physicist at the University of Leeds in England. In the 1980s, the physicist Eric Heller of Harvard was exploring quantum chaos: What happens when you apply quantum mechanics to chaotic systems?

A deep dive into the world of Generation Rescue has revealed that the organization doesn’t just promote ineffective or medically unproven or downright debunked treatments for autism (all of which has been demonstrated before): The organization and the people associated with it profit from them, too. In two cases, Generation Rescue has heavily promoted products owned by past board members, at the time they served on the board: hyperbaric oxygen chambers and B12 lollipops, both of which have been presented on GR’s website as near-miraculous treatments for symptoms of autism. One of Generation Rescue’s often-cited medical experts, who’s appeared repeatedly at their conferences, is a past member of their medical advisory board, and is quoted more than once on their website, is a doctor who was placed on probation in 2011 for prescribing chelation and other questionable medical treatments to a 7-year-old child.

In a strange paradox, the San Andreas produces only big earthquakes because it is what seismologists consider a “weak” fault. The motion of that ripple across the “rug” of the San Andreas Fault creates the seismic energy that we experience as an earthquake. Some people think that modern technology has solved much of the fire problem because the two big California earthquakes of the late twentieth century, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco and the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, did not lead to devastating fire

Drawing on evidence across multiple continents, scientists say these Snowball Earth events may have paved the way for the Cambrian explosion of life that followed — the period when complex, multicellular organisms began to diversify and spread across the planet. When Caltech geologist Joe Kirschvink coined the term Snowball Earth in 1989 — merging ideas that some geologists, climate physicists and planetary chemists had been thinking about for decades  — many earth scientists were skeptical that these cataclysmic events could really have occurred. For a long time we had a lot of evidence for glaciation at low latitude and in the warmest parts of the Earth, but we didn’t really have a good idea of the dates of these events.

Cow 401 and her herdmates were the product of two and a half years of research, Van Eenennaam’s attempt to create a strain of gene-edited cattle specially suited to the needs of the beef industry. Since beef ranchers generally prefer males to females (more meat for the money), Van Eenennaam believed there could someday be a market for these Crispr’d animals. If and when the FDA decides to weigh in, says Hank Greely, a bioethicist and professor of law at Stanford, it will have to reckon with the unique risks of gene editing—that an edit might produce new allergens, for example, or spread from livestock to their wild cousins.

In 2015, researchers made history by detecting gravitational waves from colliding black holes for the first time — and this was such a milestone that three U.S. physicists almost immediately won the Nobel Prize for their work on the project. The 2017 Nobel Prize in physics laureates (from left) Barry C. Barish, Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, pose during a joint news conference in December 2017 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm. Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

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Jonathan Nackstrand/AFP/Getty Images

The 2017 Nobel Prize in physics laureates (from left) Barry C. Barish, Kip S. Thorne and Rainer Weiss, pose during a joint news conference in December 2017 at the Royal Swedish Academy of Science in Stockholm.

Now a study in the journal Brain reveals differences in the sensory nerves that enter the spinal cords of men and women with neuropathic pain, which is persistent shooting or burning pain. Tailoring new medicines to men or women would be revolutionary, particularly considering that it took many years for women (and female animals) to get included in pain research at all. Mogil once emailed a researcher, asking whether a pain drug worked better in men than women.

The discovery that mitochondria might control the reprogramming of cells drove Khacho and Ruth Slack, her postdoctoral adviser at the University of Ottawa, to further investigate the role of the organelles in neuronal stem cells. But Slack and Khacho saw the opposite in neural stem cells from rodents: In their work, mitochondria start off elongated in the stem cells, then become fragmented in progenitor cells (which are more committed to a specific cell fate) before becoming elongated again as they differentiate into neurons. The real significance of Slack and Khacho’s work in neural stem cells might be that the mitochondria’s role in neurogenesis relates to something more dynamic than shape alone.

Last year, two satellites the size of cereal boxes sped toward Mars as though they were on an invisible track in space. The satellites, known as cubesats, were sent to watch over NASA’s larger InSight spacecraft as it attempted a perilous landing on the surface of Mars at the end of November. The operation was a success, and the performance of the MarCO satellites may change the way missions operate, enabling cubesats to become deep space travelers in their own right.