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Access to safe drinking water — and its equitable distribution — underpins public health. But for the estimated 250,000 people in Kibera, who live without any government infrastructure, clean water is often a luxury. A system that uses aerial pipes to transport water is providing an affordable solution.

Pawpaws, tropical-tasting plants native to North America, aren’t widely accessible in stores, but this hard-to-get fruit has gained a cult following in recent decades — and the supply simply isn’t meeting the demand. Bringing a niche crop to the grocery store, though, is more complicated than it seems.

In “Do I Know You,” Sadie Dingfelder weaves together personal memoir and science reporting — including brain scans, computerized tests, and assessments by medical researchers — to describe the challenge of living with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and the many different ways people experience the world.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT will produce answers to almost any question a user asks. But one computer scientist cautions that such chatbots aren’t equipped to answer life’s big, existential questions. Living with uncertainty when making important decisions, she says, is a part of being human.

Several recent studies on the effectiveness of gunshot detection technology have found it has little if any impact on shootings, investigations, or prosecutions. Meanwhile, officials in cities like Houston, New York, and Chicago are having doubts or abandoning their commitment to the law-enforcement strategy.

In 2013, Texas passed a pioneering law that allows for new trials in cases with flawed scientific evidence. But in the 10 years after the law went into effect, the state’s highest criminal court has rejected most of those challenges, a recent report found. “The law isn’t working as people believed it would.”

This August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to make a decision about whether to approve the psychedelic MDMA for use in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder. A negative decision could stymie research into other psychedelics, which are likely to face similar regulatory challenges.

In “The Language Puzzle,” Steven Mithen draws on the latest findings from an array of fields, including linguistics, archeology, anthropology, psychology, and genetics, to show how human language gradually evolved over millions of years from primal grunts into today’s full-throated communication.

In this month’s Selective Pressure column, C. Brandon Ogbunu revisits a debate about so-called “research parasites” — scientists who use and reanalyze other people’s data. The large language models used in generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have made this debate about data sharing relevant again, Ogbunu writes.

The Big Cat Public Safety Act, which was estimated to cost $3 million to implement between 2022 and 2027, focused on tens and thousands of animals that almost certainly do not exist. The law also appears to have led to unintended consequences.

While weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro are in an enduring shortage dating back to 2022, compounding pharmacies are allowed to sell their own versions. Though the practice is FDA-authorized, it is heatedly disputed by the brand-name companies, which cite “serious health risks.”

Starting in the 2000s, schools across the country began weighing their students, sometimes even sending home report cards with each student’s body-mass index. Since then, evidence has mounted that the weigh-in policies are ineffective — or even harmful. Why do they persist?