Table of contents for April 2016 in Discover

Q What’s the deal with that star that was giving off weird light signals? People on the news were suggesting it might be the work of aliens. Seriously? If so, what are the implications for humanity? — James Praderas, Bellevue, Wash. A The star known as KIC 8462852 does have an unusual light pattern, meaning something odd probably orbits it. Right now, we don’t know more than that. Speculation includes a comet swarm or a giant cloud of dust or gas. One other possibility has also captured the media’s attention: The star could host a gigantic alien structure. And this explanation is actually being taken seriously — sort of — by scientists. A study published in December announced SETI scientists had searched the system for laser signals, but they had…

What do you do after pushing the boundaries of the solar system? How about looking to the edge of the cosmos? Stone has signed on as executive director of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), an observatory to be built in Hawaii. The scope will feature a 30-meter (100-foot) light-collecting surface designed to achieve three times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope. The TMT was to be completed in 2024, but local groups have protested its location because they regard it as sacred ground; last December, Hawaii’s Supreme Court revoked TMT’s construction permit. “We are assessing our next steps forward,” Stone says. He knows too well that great acts of exploration can’t be rushed.…

Often in science it takes a long time to understand exactly how confused you are. Nobody knew to wonder how the dinosaurs went extinct, for instance, until 19th-century fossil diggers realized that dinosaurs had existed in the first place. In the case of dark matter — the unseen something that seems to make up about five-sixths of the matter in the universe — the confusion has been building for a good 84 years, and shows no sign of going away. That’s not how it was supposed to be. A few years ago, various instruments seemed hot on the trail of the unseen cosmic component. In space, the orbiting Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected possible hints of dark matter particles breaking down into visible components. In an Italian laboratory, an international…

There’s nothing wrong with your vision; this is just how Alaska’s Malaspina Glacier rolls. Or surges. Those zigzag patterns result from periodic bursts of acceleration in ice flow that can last several years. During a surge, the ice can move 10 to 20 meters per day; the rest of the time, it creeps along at 1 meter or less. As a result, the ice, rock and soil will fold and shear, creating the bold patterns in this 27-mile-wide view from above. The Malaspina is a piedmont glacier, in which the ice spreads out over a wide, flat plain, much like pancake batter in a frying pan. Malaspina is the largest of its type in the world.…

You might think of bugs as pests, if you bother to think about them at all. Alper Bozkurt’s research will quickly set you straight: To him they’re engineering wonders, deft flying and crawling machines that reproduce in nature more reliably than widgets made in a factory. Bozkurt’s interest isn’t just academic. By the time his work is through, in maybe 10 years, an army of cockroaches and moths just might save your life. An electrical and computer engineer at North Carolina State University, Bozkurt is among the first of a kind: He tinkers with bugs. Much of the circuitry he works with already exists — networks of neurons, honed by years of evolution — and he augments this circuitry with his own small electronic devices. He envisions a future in…

BIOCHEMIST GLENN KING spends his days getting up close and personal with the creatures that make us shudder: spiders, centipedes and scorpions. He’s collecting their often-deadly venoms to find the perfect painkiller. King, a researcher at the University of Queensland in Australia, studies the neurotoxins that allow these creatures to paralyze and kill their prey. The toxins shut down a channel on the membranes of different types of neurons. In humans, the same mechanism that spells doom for prey could be modified to stop pain signals in their tracks. As King explains it, this channel is the first step in the process of amplifying pain signals up the spinal cord to the brain. If researchers can use venoms to develop a drug that blocks this channel, we could provide relief…

If you ever visit a Las Vegas casino, look up. Hundreds of cameras cling to the ceiling like jetblack barnacles, watching the tables below. The artificial eyes are there to protect the casino’s income from the quick-witted and light-fingered. Until the 1960s, casinos’ definition of such cheating was fairly clear-cut. They only had to worry about things like dealers paying out on losing hands or players slipping high-value chips into their stake after the roulette ball had landed. The games themselves were fine; they were unbeatable. Except it turned out that wasn’t true. Mathematics professor Edward Thorp found a loophole in blackjack big enough to fit a best-selling book through. Then a group of physics students tamed roulette, traditionally the epitome of chance. Beyond the casino floor, people even scooped…

When city officials placed shade balls in the Los Angeles Reservoir last summer to reduce evaporation and stop sunlight from triggering chemical reactions, onlookers noticed the balls arranging into strangely intricate patterns. Why? Look to chemistry for the answer: The 96 million balls mimic the behavior of atoms. The 4-inch balls are restricted to a two-dimensional plane, so they tend to organize into efficient hexagonal grids, much like the atoms in crystals. Each grid reflects sunlight slightly differently, and lower water levels result in double stacking, leading to the reservoir’s patchwork look. DID YOU KNOW? Letting someone skip ahead of you in the checkout line? Aren’t you nice — though a study in Human Nature revealed we’re more likely to allow a line-jumper if the benefit to them is greater…

Pathologist Pigeons? In a recent study, researchers showed that trained pigeons could correctly distinguish malignant from benign breast tissue samples that appeared on a touchscreen. With a little more than two weeks of training, the birds’ cancer diagnoses were accurate 85 percent of the time. So what did Discover readers think about pigeons’ newfound skill?…

Ed Stone is the kind of guy who can glimpse the outer limits of human exploration just by looking at a water faucet. We are huddled in his minimalist Caltech office, discussing his four decades of work on NASA’s twin Voyager space probes. Suddenly he decides that our conversation is getting too abstract. In the summer of 2012, Voyager 1 became the first probe to enter interstellar space, and Stone wants me (and you) to really feel what that means. So off we go to a small kitchenette down the hall for a hands-on science explainer. Everything you need to know about the journey to interstellar space is right there in the sink, Stone explains. He pushes the handle, and a fat stream of water hits the sink’s bowl, creating…

The archaeological evidence left behind by the first people to settle the Americas tells a confusing story. Researchers have long understood that people migrated from Siberia to Alaska across a region called Beringia, which included a now-submerged land bridge — but they disagree whether the artifacts at Siberian sites resemble those on the other side of the Bering Strait. And the few skulls they’ve found of the earliest Americans don’t look much like those of modern Native Americans. The sparse and sometimes conflicting data raised questions about who the first settlers of the Americas were, when they arrived and whether other waves of migration followed. The lack of evidence inspired some, shall we say, “esoteric” theories of Paleolithic settlers boating over from France or Polynesia. “For a while, everybody could…