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Dear EarthTalk: What is the gist of Pres. Obama’s new plan to tackle global warming, and how does the green community feel about what the White House is proposing?—Bill Kemp, Seattle In what’s being billed as the greatest environmental initiative of his presidency, Barack Obama announced on June 25, 2013 that his administration is instituting stringent mandatory restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions by power plants, factories and other industrial sources. These sources combined account for roughly 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions across the U....

By Letitia Stein TAMPA, Fla., Aug 31 (Reuters) - Florida’s governor declared an emergency on Wednesday ahead of an approaching weather system that could bring life-threatening flooding and fierce winds, placing parts of the state’s Gulf Coast under a tropical storm warning and a hurricane watch. Storm preparations were also under way on Hawaii’s Big Island, where residents were warned of an approaching hurricane. The state’s governor ordered the closing of state offices on Wednesday....

Look up Friday and Saturday nights (Aug. 11 and 12) for this year’s Perseid meteor shower peak. For Northern Hemisphere observers, August is usually regarded as “meteor month,” with one of the best displays of the year reaching its peak near midmonth. That display is, of course, the annual Perseid meteor shower, which is beloved by meteor enthusiasts and summer campers alike. But skywatchers beware: You will face a major obstacle in your attempt to observe this year’s Perseid performance — namely, the moon....

Animal corpses rarely defy the dictate of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” to become fossils—and even if they do, they don’t remain sturdy for long. By the time paleontologists get their hands on ancient remains, the fossils are incredibly fragile. So for decades, researchers have tended to do their close analyses with replicas instead. But in the past decade, 3-D printing has enabled a new solution: printing out copies of skulls and bones....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from the book, Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck?, by Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig (Hudson Street Press, 2012). Copyright © Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig. Robin Henig has written several articles for Scientific American, including “When Does Life Belong to the Living?” and “How Depressed Is That Mouse?”. With all the emails, tweets, chats, and status updates continually vying for brain space, young people these days are slave to what’s been called “continuous partial attention....

LEFT BEHIND Natal is the capital of Rio Grande do Norte, an underdeveloped state that contributes less than 1% of gross domestic product (GDP). Population Natal: 789,896 (metropolitan area: 2.7 million) Brazil: 186.8 million Infant Mortality (per 1,000 births) Natal: 36.1 Brazil: 25.1 Illiteracy Above Age 15 Natal: 21.5% Brazil: 11% Life Expectancy Natal: 70.1 São Paulo: 73.9 State Contribution to national gdp Rio Grande do Norte: 0.9% São Paulo: 30....

In their journey into the Americas, the ancestors of present-day Indigenous peoples overcame extraordinary challenges. They survived the bitter cold and arid conditions of a global climatic event between 26,000 and 20,000 years ago known as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). They developed relationships with unfamiliar lands and their flora and fauna. There are many perspectives that aim to explain these events. Indigenous peoples have numerous oral histories of their origins....

At a research institute in Hungary not far from the banks of the Danube, an emotional bond began to grow between an elderly night janitor and an old watchdog living there named Balthasar. The dog would sometimes spend the day at the janitor’s home. “Unfortunately, this relationship lasted only a few months, because the janitor became ill … and eventually died,” writes animal behaviorist Vilmos Csányi, founder of the department of ethology at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, in his book If Dogs Could Talk....

The broader outlines of the physical world, from quarks to the cosmos, have been apparent for decades. Does this mean physicists are about to tie it all up into a neat package? Not at all. Just when you think you know everything, the universe begins to look its strangest. The detection of what seems for all the world to be a Higgs boson illustrates this idea beautifully. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva has provided fodder for physicists from many nations working on a variety of projects but none more important or as eagerly awaited as the confirmation of the Higgs (page 4)....

We live in a deeply divided nation. And don’t worry, I’m not venturing into politics. I’m talking about the never-ending debate about whether you’ll lose more weight by cutting carbs or by limiting fat. There have been dozens of studies—and numerous meta-analyses—pitting the two approaches against one another. They’ve been evaluated not just for weight loss but other measures of health such as cholesterol, blood sugar, blood pressure, and body composition, as well....

A DIRTY TRICK The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity by Bruce Hood. Oxford University Press, 2012 ($29.95) When a newborn baby’s eyes scan a room, Hood writes, the infant does not decide where to focus. Instead inborn cognitive mechanisms respond to the environment and focus the baby’s attention. Later in life, the child develops self-awareness and the conviction that he consciously controls his body and brain. Yet what if this belief does not reflect reality?...

This story is a supplement to the feature “Self-Cleaning Materials: Lotus Leaf-Inspired Nanotechnology” which was printed in the August 2008 issue of Scientific American. Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed multilayered superhydrophilic coatings that are antifogging and antireflective. Alternating layers of polymer and nanoparticles of silica (which have hydroxyl groups bound to their surface) form a superhydrophilic coating that can be applied to glass and other materials. The coating surface is rough at the nanoscale, but the hydroxyl is strongly hydrophilic, which helps nanoscopic pores throughout the multilayers to soak up water like a sponge, instantly wicking it away from the surface....

Plant-based meat alternatives are making the rounds from food blogs to five-star restaurants—and soon they may appear on menus for some decidedly different diners. A new study published in Communications Biology shows how to trick mosquitoes into eating beet juice “blood” laced with poison. Mosquito-borne diseases kill more than 700,000 people every year, with malaria alone claiming more than half of them, says Stockholm University infection biologist and study lead author S....

It is easy to assume that most people who get the COVID-19 vaccine do so without a shred of trepidation, while those who are hesitant about it choose never to get vaccinated. But a recent set of findings blows up this binary and provides insights that could make vaccination campaigns more successful. The studies cut through toxic public discourse about the vaccine and focus on a significant group that is often overlooked by researchers, policy makers and the media: so-called hesitant adopters....

A busy bowling alley might seem noisy, but behind the lanes the cacophony is significantly louder. As the heavy balls crash into the wooden pins, hefty motors, conveyor belts, pulleys and cams clatter behind each “pit,” grabbing the wreckage from one collision while hoisting and arranging pins so they are ready for the next one. For years pin boys stood at the lane ends, manually resetting pins and rolling the balls back to bowlers....

Edited by Dava Sobel elusive if not rare. there are always vectors and other values if not measured at least felt or experienced at the boundary of ground: imbalance and, therefore, movement. the creation comes, then with the condition of height and time: eight stories up suspended in a moment binary values of ones and zeroes— just snow or not snow— no vectors of momentum or spin no description of unique shape or crystalline order just points to move between floating to observe as picking through pond lilies or stars in the winter sky there or not there in this moment the scalar nature of snow *No longer in print but will be reissued electronically in early 2022 and as part of a new volume, Hear Here: Selected Poems (LuLu)....

Key concepts Human Body Binocular vision Stereopsis Depth perception 3-D Introduction Is catching, juggling or heading a ball challenging for you? If you’ve ever tried threading a needle, did it end in frustration? Have you ever thought of blaming your eyes? Two eyes that work together help you estimate how far a ball is or where the thread is with respect to the needle. This “working together” of the eyes actually happens in the brain....

The Southeast’s spate of freakish fall fires continued on Monday night. Tinderbox conditions and powerful winds whipped up a firestorm in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, forcing the evacuation of at least 14,000 residents from the gateway communities of Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tenn. Fleeing residents documented a harrowing nighttime escape on social media as flames licked the side of the road and smoke clogged the air. This is a fire for the history books,” Gatlinburg Mayor Mike Werner said....

Mahzarin Banaji wrestled with a slide projector while senior executives filed grumpily into the screening room at New Line Cinema studios in Los Angeles. They anticipated a pointless November afternoon in which they would be lectured on diversity, including their shortcomings in portraying characters on-screen. “My expectations were of total boredom,” admitted Camela Galano, president of New Line International. By the break, though, executives for New Line and its fellow Time Warner subsidiary HBO were crowding around Banaji, eager for more....

People can control prosthetic limbs, computer programs and even remote-controlled helicopters with their mind, all by using brain-computer interfaces. What if we could harness this technology to control things happening inside our own body? A team of bioengineers in Switzerland has taken the first step toward this cyborglike setup by combining a brain-computer interface with a synthetic biological implant, allowing a genetic switch to be operated by brain activity. It is the world’s first brain-gene interface....