Scientific American - February 2019

February 2019, ScientificAmerican.com 1

FEBRUARY 2019

VOLUME 320, NUMBER 2

Photograph by Juan Arredondo

NEUROSCIENCE

22 Face Values

Researchers have isolated

the brain regions that process

faces and cracked the code

for recognizing them.

By  Doris  Y.  Tsao 

BIOLOGY

30 Ghost Flowers

The genes of Hawaiian plants,

extinct for more than a century,

have been brought back from

the dead. Today we can smell

their scents.

By  Rowan  Jacobsen

ENVIRONMENT

40 Is Antarctica

Collapsing?

Rapid glacier retreat could put

coastlines underwater sooner

than anticipated.

By Richard B. Alley

ANTHROPOLOGY

46 Guardians of

the Tiger People

As anthropologists debate how best

to protect uncontacted tribes, indig-

enous groups in Colombia are work-

ing to shield their isolated neigh-

bors from the march of modernity.

By  Adam  Piore

PLANETARY SCIENCE

56 The Exoplanet Next Door

What Venus can teach us about

planets far beyond our own solar

system. By  M.  Darby Dyar,

Suzanne  E. Smrekar and

Stephen  R.  Kane

ECOLOGY

64 Re-engineering

the Colorado River

Can dam releases that mimic natu-

ral flows restore the Grand Canyon

ecosystem? By Heather Hansman

ON THE COVER

Scientists have taken major steps toward

understanding how the brain recognizes faces—

one of the great challenges of neuroscience.

Not only have they found sections of the cerebral

cortex that perform this function, they have

also decoded the computations that enable

the brain to distinguish any given face.

Illustration by Maciej Frolow.

© 2019 Scientific American