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The United States cut a deal yesterday with wealthy countries to curb public financing for coal plants, an agreement the White House called a “major step forward” ahead of U.N. climate change negotiations in Paris this month. The deal agreed to by members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) marks the first time a large number of nations have set common standards for coal subsidies. The White House estimated yesterday that about 80 percent of coal technology in the current export credit agency pipeline would become ineligible for financing because of the agreement....

Science has learned many lessons about what makes something addictive. And now this knowledge is being used by the tech business to gain our attention, and keep us coming back for more. In his new book, “Irresistible,” New York University associate professor of marketing Adam Alter argues that society is experiencing the beginnings of an epidemic of “behavioral addiction,” and that this could have dangerous and far-reaching implications for us all....

Cancer afflicts more older people than those in any other age group. In fact, over half of cancers diagnosed in the United States occur in those over the age of 65. That number is expected to reach 70 percent by 2030, as the population experiences an unprecedented boom of senior citizens. A growing number of targeted cancer therapies and immunotherapies are available today, but older people often don’t have access to these options, putting them at greater risk of dying from their disease....

Darrel G. F. Long, a sedimentologist at the department of earth sciences at Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, explains. Quicksand is a mixture of sand and water, or sand and air, that looks solid, but becomes unstable when disturbed by any additional stress. In normal sand, grains are packed tightly together to form a rigid mass, with about 25 to 30 percent of the space (voids) between the grains filled with air or water....

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The day after businessman and reality-TV star Donald Trump was sworn into office as the 45th president of the United States, hundreds of thousands of protestors descended on the nation’s capital allied loosely under the banner of marching for human rights. More than 200 similar marches had also been planned in cities across the country. The Women’s March on Washington started near the Capitol and brought together a far-flung coalition of individuals and groups....

Each year hundreds of the best and brightest researchers gather in Lindau, Germany, for the Nobel Laureate Meeting. There, the newest generation of scientists mingles with Nobel Prize winners and discusses their work and ideas. The 2013 meeting is dedicated to chemistry and will involve young researchers from 78 different countries. In anticipation of the event, which will take place from June 30 through July 5, we are highlighting a group of attendees under 30 who represent the future of chemistry....

Viruses are notorious for evading man-made drugs, but they are powerless against a rare mutation in the gene ISG15. A person who possesses this mutation is better at fighting off most (if not all) of the viruses that plague humankind—but probably fewer than one person in 10 million has it. Dusan Bogunovic of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai thinks it may be possible to develop a drug that mimics this mutation....

Generally speaking, psychology holds that five major factors, or traits, shape our personalities: openness to experience, conscientiousness (facility with planning ahead), extraversion (being sociable), agreeableness (including being considerate of others) and neuroticism (subject to worry). Each of these “big five” has half a dozen dimensions. If you’re like me, you probably enjoy taking those free online tests to see where you fall on each. It’s perhaps immediately obvious that our personalities shape our responses to things that happen to us....

By Daria Sito-Sucic SARAJEVO (Reuters) - Police in Bosnia searched on Friday for two people swept away during the second bout of torrential rainfall since May, when the Balkans were hit by the worst floods in more than a century. The body of a woman was recovered on Thursday from the muddy bank of a river in northwestern Bosnia, and two people were listed as missing, police said. Bosnia suffered almost 2 billion euros worth of damage to homes, infrastructure and industry in May, when heavy rains caused rivers to burst their banks, sweep away roads and bridges and set off hundreds of landslides....

Shifts in climate that occurred in Africa between three million and one million years ago may have played a pivotal role in the speciation and dispersal of early humans, scientists say. Conventional wisdom holds that our hominid forebears evolved under increasingly arid conditions in East Africa. But the results of a new study suggest that this drying trend may have been interspersed with episodes of humidity, forcing humans and other mammals to adapt to their fast-changing environs....

We often assume we see our physical surroundings as they actually are. But new research suggests that how we see the world depends on what we want from it. People see desirable objects as physically closer than less desirable ones, according to a study in the January issue of Psychological Science. When psychologists Emily Balcetis of New York University and David Dunning of Cornell University asked people to estimate how far away a bottle of water was, those who were thirsty guessed it was closer than nonthirsty people did....

Roughly 12,900 years ago a global-cooling anomaly contributed to the extinction of 35 mammal species, including the mammoth. In some areas, average temperatures may have dropped as much as 15 degrees Celsius (27 degrees Fahrenheit). New evidence, in the form of diamonds several nanometers wide, supports a theory proposed last year that a comet collision or a similar explosive event threw up debris and caused the cooling. Nanodiamonds occur only in sediment exposed to high temperatures and pressures, such as that produced by a cometary impact....

The federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA has not kept pace with wearable fitness trackers, mobile health apps and online patient communities, leaving a gaping hole in regulations that needs to be filled, according to a much-delayed government report. The report, which was supposed to be complete in 2010, does not include specific recommendations for fixing the problem, even though Congress asked the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to provide them....

Here’s one thing on which everyone agrees: social psychology is overwhelmingly composed of liberals—around 85 percent, according to a 2012 survey by researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. The question of why this is the case, and whether it presents a problem, is more controversial. The topic has exploded over the past several years, with claims of both overt hostility and subtle bias against conservative students, colleagues and their publications being met with reactions ranging from knee-jerk dismissal to sincere self-reflection and measured methodological critique....

In my freshman seminar at Harvard University in spring 2021, I mentioned that the nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, emits mostly infrared radiation and has a planet, Proxima b, in the habitable zone around it. As a challenge to the students, I asked: “Suppose there are creatures crawling on the surface of Proxima b. What would their infrared-sensitive eyes look like?” The brightest student in class responded within seconds with an image of the mantis shrimp, which possesses infrared vision....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - Kitty litter used to absorb liquid in radioactive debris may have triggered a chemical reaction that caused a radiation leak at a below-ground U.S. nuclear waste storage site in New Mexico, a state environmental official said on Tuesday. The waste disposal site, where drums of plutonium-tainted refuse from nuclear weapons factories and laboratories are buried in salt caverns 2,100 feet (640 meters) underground, has been shut down since unsafe radiation levels were first detected there on Feb....

For more than a century biologists made great strides in understanding the complex tapestry of life by tracing the smaller and shorter threads in its many patterns. This reductionist approach, which breaks complicated processes into their component parts to understand them better, has produced extraordinary advances. We take it for granted, for example, that DNA molecules—and not proteins—carry our genetic information, but that was a matter of huge debate and study in the early 20th century....

Running low on fuel, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has begun the final — and most daring — phase of its epic mission to Saturn. After using a final flyby of the moon Titan on Friday to boost its speed, Cassini was flung by the moon’s gravity to a trajectory that sent it diving through the 1,200-mile (1,930 kilometers) gap between the planet’s upper atmosphere and innermost rings, NASA officials said. Cassini completed the first crossing of the ring plane at about 2 a....

Men and women both transmit an increasing number of new mutations to their children as they age, according to a study published today in Nature1. The finding is based on an analysis of whole genomes from nearly 5,000 people. The increase in these ‘de novo’ mutations may explain why older parents are more likely to have a child with a condition such as autism. Men accumulate de novo mutations four times faster than women, the researchers found....

In the 1960s, the heyday of psychoanalysis, psychiatrists often saw their patients five days a week. But the number of psychiatrists today who focus on talk therapy is dwindling, according to a recent study that analyzed trends in psychiatry offices across the U.S. The study’s authors determined that between 1996 and 2005 the percentage of psychiatry office visits involving psychotherapy decreased from about 44.4 percent—already a significant decline from the 1980s—to 28....