[Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast.]

Studies in recent decades have confirmed the efficacy of placebos--inactive drugs that patients believe are medicinal--in everything from depression to cancer.

The Indian space probe Chandrayaan 1 adjusted its orbit around the moon in one of its final maneuvers before releasing a lunar impactor. [More]

Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in our May 2002 issue. We are posting it because of news from the JUPITER trial.

AS RECENTLY AS FIVE YEARS AGO, most physicians would have confidently described atherosclerosis as a straight plumbing problem: Fat-laden gunk gradually builds up on the surface of passive artery walls. If a deposit (plaque) grows large enough, it eventually closes off an affected “pipe,” preventing blood from reaching its intended tissue. After a while the blood-starved tissue dies. When a part of the cardiac muscle or the brain succumbs, a heart attack or stroke occurs.

Editor's Note: This story, originally printed in the January 2008 issue of Scientific American, is being posted in light of two new studies showing that angiogenesis inhibitors, discussed in this article, may actually make tumors bigger, not smaller. [More]

If current theories prove correct, ordinary matter--all that we can see, smell and touch--makes up just a fraction, maybe 4 percent, of the universe. The rest comes from the so-called dark sector: dark matter and dark energy, a mysterious and pervasive energy that is suspected of speeding the universe's expansion. Dark matter, so known because it refuses to emit or interact with light in a way that we can see, is nearly six times as prevalent as ordinary matter. But, for all its ubiquity, it is often tagged as being fairly bland, a sort of galactic deadweight that only reveals itself through its gravitational pull. [More]

If even the thought of mounting a long staircase makes your knees ache, help could be on the way in the form of a supportive lower-body exoskeleton recently introduced by Honda Motor Co., Ltd. The company's walking assist device is designed to reduce the load on leg muscles and joints (in the hip, knees, and ankles) by supporting a portion of the wearer's bodyweight. It acts as an exoskeleton in that it straps over the wearer's clothes and provides two artificial legs that fit alongside the wearer's own legs. [More]

One of the first questions batted about in political, tech and media circles after Barack Obama won the presidential election last week was what he was going to do with the massive, wired network of supporters he’d built over his two-year campaign. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the president-elect who signed emails to his acolytes “Barack” plans to continue communicating directly with that fan base once he’s in the Oval Office, bypassing mainstream journalism and creating what his team is calling “new media.” [More]

Cholesterol-lowering statin drugs are already blockbuster medicines taken by 30 million people around the world. Now it turns out you still might need them if you have normal cholesterol. There’s a new risk factor in town: A protein associated with inflammation. [More]

Since 2003, fish biologist Arthur Devries of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign has not caught a single adult Antarctic toothfish--a species sometimes sold at grocery stores as Chilean sea bass. In the 1970s Devries would catch as many as 500 adults in a season as part of his research into the proteins that keep their blood from freezing.

Or so Devries and David Ainley of the environmental consulting firm H. T. Harvey Associates reported this year to the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources. The Commission, established in 1982 and tasked with regulating the fisheries governed by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty (which protects all the territory below 60 degrees south latitude and oceans south of the Polar Front), had a meeting of the Ecosystem Monitoring and Management working group in Moscow in July. In advance of that meeting, more than two dozen "concerned Ross Sea researchers" joined Ainley and Devries in a formal letter demanding a moratorium on fishing over the Ross Sea continental shelf and a reduction in quotas along the continental slope.