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The United Nations’ climate diplomat has historically worked in the background as presidents, government ministers and celebrities made a public case for action. But Yvo de Boer has been anything but a wallflower. In his three years in the U.N. climate post, de Boer, 55, has made himself at home in front of microphones and cameras in the push to craft a new global warming treaty. At last year’s climate summit in Poznan, Poland, for example, college students jockeyed for opportunities to talk with the former Dutch housing official....

In an attempt to solve the mystery of the Universe’s missing antimatter, physicists have achieved the most precise measurement yet of the proton’s inherent magnetism. Publishing in Nature on 28 May, a group of researchers has mastered a technique to measure the magnetic moment of a proton — the microscopic equivalent of the strength of a bar magnet — with an accuracy of 3 parts per billion. The experiments are part of an effort to figure out why the Universe appears to be filled with matter rather than antimatter....

GENIUS, UNPROCLAIMED Tonight the hoary caveman contemplates Not just tomorrow’s risky hunting fate, But he has indeed resolved our origin And where the stellar heavens did begin. He depicts no record of any kind And so this genius is lost in time. What are the rules for genius-designates? Somewhere today a genius contemplates The deepest mysteries of the human mind. Yet, for the laws of Science, she is blind. How is her silent genius measured then As this mother toils and her children tends?...

Cheng Liu, CEO and Chairman of Eureka Therapeutics. Credit: Eureka Therapeutics In the next five to ten years, what two key things could improve T cell therapy? The number one thing is the T cell therapy needs to have some success in solid tumors—expanding beyond hematological diseases. The longer term is beyond solid tumors, and T cell therapy has the potential to treat viral infections, such as Epstein-Barr virus and HIV....

Just as the planet is being taxed from record-breaking temperatures, new research finds iconic Douglas firs across the West are water- and heat-stressed. Similar to the humans who find themselves sluggish during a heat wave, when water is scarce, Douglas firs also put the brakes on growing — a choice that could have ramifications for forest carbon stocks and the global carbon cycle. “If trees are being less productive, if they are not growing as well, they are taking in less CO2 from the atmosphere,” said Christina Restaino, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis....

By Kathryn Doyle NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A survey of teen smokers has added more evidence that flavored tobacco products are particularly attractive to people younger than the legal smoking age. “Consistent with national school-based estimates, this study confirms widespread appeal of flavored products among youth tobacco users,” the authors, led by Bridget K. Ambrose of the Center for Tobacco Products at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Maryland, wrote in their research letter....

As Valentine’s Day approaches, you may be pondering one question: what attracted you to your partner? Was it your similarities? Your shared love of classical music and long walks on the beach? Well, science tells us that the inspiration for our relationships may not be all that romantic. We’ve all heard that opposites attract, and it may actually be your differences, specifically those related to smell, that help you pick your mate....

If the conditions are just right, some of the electrons inside a material will arrange themselves into a tidy honeycomb pattern — like a solid within a solid. Physicists have now directly imaged these ‘Wigner crystals’, named after the Hungarian-born theorist Eugene Wigner, who first imagined them almost 90 years ago. Researchers had convincingly created Wigner crystals and measured their properties before, but this is the first time that anyone has actually taken a snapshot of the patterns, says study co-author Feng Wang, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley....

Ever since the wildly optimistic projections of progress from the mid-20th century—robot companions, extra-orbital sojourns, 200-year life spans—scientists have been gently dialing back the public’s expectations. So, perhaps it is no sobering surprise that many of the hopeful predictions for scientific advancements for the new millennium have yet to come to pass. “We were supposed to have cities under domes, jet packs and space planes that could take commuters from Los Angeles to Tokyo in two hours,” Paul Milo, author of Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century (Harper, 2009), told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month....

Does your hometown have any mathematical tourist attractions such as statues, plaques, graves, the cafe where the famous conjecture was made, the desk where the famous initials are scratched, birthplaces, houses, or memorials? Have you encountered a mathematical sight on your travels? If so, we invite you to submit an essay to this column. Be sure to include a picture, a description of its mathematical significance, and either a map or directions so that others may follow in your tracks....

This is one of the fictitious scenarios presented to 55 physicians around the country as part of a study to look at the usability of electronic health records (EHRs). To prescribe medications, a doctor has to locate them in the EHR system. At one hospital a simple search for Tylenol brings up a list of more than 80 options. Roger is a 26-year-old man, but the list includes Tylenol for children and infants, as well as Tylenol for menstrual cramps....

Researchers in the U.S. have begun editing the genes of adults with devastating diseases, using a tool known as CRISPR. China has already launched multiple trials of CRISPR in humans. Last year Chinese researcher He Jiankui caused a global outcry when he used the same tool to gene edit twin baby girls when they were just embryos. There is far less concern about other CRISPR trials either in the U.S. or China, in part because genetic changes in the adults treated will not be passed on to future generations....

The deadline is approaching slowly, stealthily. You may not even realize it until the shelves of your local hardware store are void of 40-, 60-, 75- and 100-watt standard incandescent light bulbs. Congress ordered them phased out in 2007, and manufacturers stopped making them as of Dec. 31, so when they run out depends on your store’s inventory and the continuing allure of Thomas Edison’s 135-year-old invention. What will be different is the incorporation of costlier energy-efficient light bulbs into the showcase....

By Heidi Ledford of Nature magazineDiagnoses of certain mental illnesses could rise significantly from next year, say some mental-health experts – but not because of any real changes in prevalence. Instead, the critics blame what they say is a flawed approach to testing the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the standard reference used by researchers and mental-health professionals in the United States and many other countries to assess patients, inform treatment, design studies and guide health insurers....

The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist. Cold molecular things such as life-forms and terrestrial planets could not have come into existence unless the universe, starting from a hot big bang, had expanded and cooled. The formation of all the structures in the universe, from galaxies and stars to planets and Scientific American articles, has depended on the expansion....

Extreme events all over the world were marked by the influence of climate change in 2018: wildfires in California, heat waves in Europe and Asia, and record-low sea ice in the Arctic. That’s according to an annual special report released yesterday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The report, now in its eighth year, includes a collection of studies analyzing major events to determine whether climate change played a role—a field of research known as attribution science....

A big methane spike that NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity detected two years ago was not due to seasonal changes on the Red Planet, NASA scientists said. For a few weeks in late 2013 and early 2014, Curiosity noticed that atmospheric methane—a gas that could possibly be an indication of microbial activity—surged from an average background level of about 0.7 parts per billion all the way up to 7 parts per billion....

Behavior is controlled by the brain, so the brains of male mice must differ from those of female mice —right? Not necessarily, say biologists at Harvard University who have created female mice that exhibit classic male sexual behavior. “Mice have an organ in their nose called the vomeronasal organ, or VNO, that together with the brain detects the pheromones that male and female mice secrete,” Catherine Dulac explains. “These pheromones control mating, aggression and gender identification....

Touch a hot frying pan and the searing message of pain sprints up to your brain and back down to your hand so fast that the impulse to withdraw your fingers seems instantaneous. That rapid-fire signal begins in a heat-sensing molecule called a TRPV1 channel. This specialized protein is abundant on the surface of sensory nerve cells in our fingers and elsewhere and is a shape-shifter that can take an open or closed configuration....

By Karolin Schaps LONDON (Reuters) - Royal Dutch Shell has abandoned its Arctic search for oil after failing to find enough crude in a move that will appease environmental campaigners and shareholders who said its project was too expensive and risky. Shell has spent about $7 billion on exploration in the waters off Alaska so far and said it could take a hit of up to $4.1 billion for pulling out of the Chukchi Sea for the “foreseeable future”....