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By Lesley Wroughton HONIARA Solomon Islands (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry flagged cooperation on tackling climate change during a brief stop in the Solomon Islands on Wednesday, where he emphasized ties dating back to World War Two. Kerry is the first secretary of state to visit the Solomon Islands. His trip is viewed as an important part of President Barack Obama’s strategic rebalance to the Asia-Pacific region, something that has irked China and been questioned by allies who wonder about the extent of U....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In 1938, when there were just about one-tenth the number of cars on U.S. roadways as there are today, a brilliant psychologist and a pragmatic engineer joined forces to write one of the most influential works ever published on driving. A self-driving car’s killing of a pedestrian in Arizona highlights how their work is still relevant today—especially regarding the safety of automated and autonomous vehicles....

Honolulu, Hawaii The aerospace company SpaceX launched 60 of its Starlink broadband Internet satellites into orbit on 6 January — including one, called DarkSat, that is partially painted black. The probe is testing one strategy to reduce the brightness of satellite ‘megaconstellations’, which scientists fear could interfere with astronomical observations. Various companies plan to launch thousands of Internet satellites in the coming years; SpaceX, of Hawthorne, California, aims to launch 24 batches of Starlinks this year....

The most accurate thermometer in the known universe sits in a rather nondescript white building in Teddington, England, on the campus of the U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL). It looks nothing like a slender tube filled with mercury or colored alcohol. Instead, it’s a copper vessel about the size of a large cantaloupe, filled with dilute ultrapure argon gas and studded with microphones and microwave antennas, precisely shaped by a diamond-tipped lathe so that its radius varies with an uncertainty of only about 12 atomic layers of copper....

Some 1,800 years ago, Roman troops used “whistling” sling bullets as a “terror weapon” against their barbarian foes, according to archaeologists who found the cast lead bullets at a site in Scotland. Weighing about 1 ounce (30 grams), each of the bullets had been drilled with a 0.2-inch (5 millimeters) hole that the researchers think was designed to give the soaring bullets a sharp buzzing or whistling noise in flight. The bullets were found recently at Burnswark Hill in southwestern Scotland, where a massive Roman attack against native defenders in a hilltop fort took place in the second century A....

With the Trump administration set to weaken Obama-era fuel economy standards for passenger cars and trucks, a chasm is opening between red and blue states. EPA is expected to propose a rule in the coming days to prevent the standards from rising past the 2020 levels established under former President Obama, who hailed those increases as a major step toward addressing rising temperatures. Also in the crosshairs is a California waiver under the Clean Air Act that allows it and more than a dozen other states to surpass federal car rules....

Vincent van Gogh shot himself on the afternoon of July 27, 1890, in Auvers-sur-Oise, France; he died in the early morning two days later. Paul F. Gachet, the doctor who attended van Gogh during the last two months of his life, planted a thuja tree on the artist’s grave. The gesture was probably inspired by van Gogh’s admiration of thuja trees and his inclusion of their flamelike images in some of his Auvers paintings....

Archaeologists and physicists are at loggerheads over ancient Roman lead—a substance highly prized by both camps for sharply diverging reasons. Very old lead is pure, dense and much less radioactive than the newly mined metal, so it is ideal for shielding sensitive experiments that hunt for dark matter and other rare particles. But it is also has historical significance, and many archaeologists object to melting down 2,000-year-old Roman ingots that are powerful windows on ancient history....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In a factory just outside San Francisco, there’s an upright stainless steel vat the size of a small car, and it’s got something swirling inside. The vat is studded with gauges, hoses and pipes. Inside, it’s hot – just under 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Sugar and other nutrients are being pumped in because, inside this formidable container, there is life....

From Nature magazine Physicist Frank Wilczek has had to defend his ideas more than once during his long and celebrated career. His Nobel-prizewinning work on quarks, the smallest building blocks of matter, was originally considered a bit out there, he says. Even so, Wilczek, who is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was caught off guard by the severity of an attack on his latest proposal, a type of device in never-ending motion called a time crystal....

The radiometer tracks the sun’s progress across the Manhattan skyline and sends a signal from the roof to the command computer on a floor 90 meters below. Blinds fall slowly with the buzz of an electric motor, cutting off the sun’s glare on computer screens. Another computer triggers the shades on the opposite side of the building to rise while another system shuts off the air-conditioning and adjusts the internal lights....

Chemical communication between cells keeps tissues functioning and systems coordinated, but eavesdropping on the conversation is challenging. Now, researchers have developed a technique to identify signaling proteins before they leave the cell. The method could help determine which cells are sending which messages—a useful tool for analyzing the interactions occurring in the mixed populations in tissues. One possible application could reveal the cues that control stem cells—an insight that researchers hope could be applied to healing damaged tissues....

In the midst of black spruce and jack pine stands in northwestern Ontario’s Crown forests, a global trend has come home to roost. Atikokan Generating Station ceased burning coal last year to prepare for its new fuel: locally sourced wood pellets. Canada already sends wood pellets abroad for power generation, but it is now leveraging the resource on a large scale in its own backyard. Atikokan will be the largest commercial power plant in North America to convert from coal to biomass, a trend that has caught on worldwide, especially in Europe....

It was a hot day in the vineyard, and I was covered in dust, sweat and sticky juice from the grapes I had been collecting for my research on how grape biochemistry is affected by light and temperature. Suddenly, I saw something that made me stop short. Tucked in one corner of this 6.5-acre plot in Carneros, in California’s fabled Sonoma Valley, with row after neat row of Pinot Noir grapes, were a handful of alien vines....

As the Philippines assesses the havoc caused by super-typhoon Haiyan, which according to some reports killed as many as 10,000 people, speculation is heating up as to whether the disaster might be a manifestation of climate change. Speaking today at the first day of UN climate talks in Warsaw, the head of the Philippines delegation, Yeb Sano, said he will stop eating until negotiators make “meaningful” progress. But can the devastating storm be linked to the changing global climate?...

U.S. EPA today strengthened the federal public health standard for nitrogen dioxide (NO2) pollution, a limit that has been in place for nearly four decades. The final rule introduces a new one-hour maximum standard for NO2 at 100 parts per billion (ppb), a level that EPA says will protect millions of Americans from peak short-term exposures. The agency is also retaining the existing annual standard of 53 ppb. “This new one-hour standard is designed to protect the air we breathe and reduce health threats for millions of Americans,” said EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson....

California will remain in the stranglehold of drought at least until September, even as a climate system in the tropical Pacific Ocean that would have brought rainfall to the parched state appears to be weakening, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s monthly climate update released yesterday. Weather watchers had been hoping that an El Niño, which occurs when an area of the tropical Pacific Ocean warms by at least 0....

By Mary WisniewskiWASHINGTON, Illinois (Reuters) - A fast-moving storm system triggered multiple tornadoes on Sunday, killing at least five people, injuring about 40 and flattening large parts of the city of Washington, Illinois as it tore across the Midwest, officials said.The storm also forced the Chicago Bears to halt their game against the Baltimore Ravens and encourage fans at Soldier Field to seek shelter as menacing clouds rolled in. Chicago’s two major airports also briefly stopped traffic with the metropolitan area was under a tornado watch....

The scaly, green Tyrannosaurus rex of monster movies is history. The real T. rex was probably covered in a fine feathery fuzz, as were most of the dinosaurs in its family, known as the theropods, which later gave rise to birds. Rich fossil beds in northeastern China have yielded specimens confirming that a wide variety of strictly earthbound dinosaurs sported feathers during the Cretaceous period, some 125 million years ago. Studying those fossils along with feather development in modern birds has allowed researchers to reconstruct the likely steps in feather evolution....

THERE ARE MANY REASONS that promising drugs wash out during pharmaceutical development, and one of them is cytochrome P450. A set of enzymes mostly produced in the liver, CYP450, as it is commonly called, is involved in breaking down chemicals and preventing them from building up to dangerous levels in the bloodstream. Many experimental drugs, it turns out, inhibit the production of CYP450—a vexing side effect that can render such a drug toxic in humans....