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By Piya Sinha-Roy LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - As temperatures continue to rise and habitats come under threat, a group of Hollywood heavyweights is seeking to bring the spotlight back on climate change with a new documentary. “Years of Living Dangerously,” a nine-part documentary beginning Sunday on CBS Corp’s premium cable network Showtime, chronicles the human impact on the global climate and the consequences for humans of climate change. From the disappearing forests of Indonesia to the increasing frequency of California’s wildfires and the crippling Texas drought, the documentary wants to put the focus back on an issue that has lost visibility since the days of the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth....

Tens of thousands of homeowners flooded by Hurricane Sally face potentially large financial losses because the federal government lists them improperly as living outside a flood zone and does not require them to have flood insurance. The major flooding caused by Sally this week exposes flaws in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s maps of the nation’s floodplains—flaws that lead homeowners to believe they do not face a significant flood risk and do not need flood insurance....

Wildfire ripped through parts of this small city in hilly wine country last year, engulfing about 3,000 homes. That didn’t stop Jeff Lecoeuche from shopping for a house here. “Maybe I’m stupid,” he said of living near a big burn. “As an insurance agent, I should say ‘Let’s not go there,’ but my wife likes it.” Lecoeuche is a canary in the coal mine of climate adaptation. He’s an insurance broker who primarily sells Farmers Insurance, but he couldn’t find coverage from that company for the house he wanted to buy on the city’s outskirts....

The Neuse River waterdog lives a sluggish existence, as if burdened by an invisible weight. This mottled brown salamander, about as long as a human hand, rarely strays far from its concealed burrows beneath rocks or logs in the rivers of North Carolina. It “hunts” by sitting still in the riverbed, waiting for an insect to swim by, then lurches forward to swallow the object—a mindless reflex. It spends its entire life confined to water, an overgrown larva that never completes metamorphosis, with flaccid legs too small for its body, toes that haven’t finished sprouting, a missing upper jawbone and puffy larval gills bulging from its neck....

In one of the less subtle episodes of the original Star Trek series, hippies hijack the Enterprise to get to a planet that looks like paradise but turns out to be a grim, acid-soaked purgatory. Over the past two years, a similar allegory has played itself out in Mars science. Drawn to Mars largely by signs of past Earth-like conditions, researchers have finally found definitive relics of gently lapping seas and balmier skies: in particular, deposits of sulfate salts....

Imagine calling a suicide prevention hotline in a crisis. Do you ask for their data collection policy? Do you assume that your data are protected and kept secure? Recent events may make you consider your answers more carefully. Mental health technologies such as bots and chat lines serve people who are experiencing a crisis. They are some of the most vulnerable users of any technology, and they should expect their data to be kept safe, protected and confidential....

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The Trump administration will seek a heavier emphasis on human-spaceflight efforts, including crewed missions to the moon and Mars, Vice President Mike Pence said today (July 6). During a 25-minute speech at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) here on Florida’s Space Coast, Pence told the 700-plus members of the crowd that the United States is “at the dawn of a new era of space exploration,” and called for a return to the moon and “American boots on the face of Mars....

DILEMMAS OF FREE WILL In “The World without Free Will,” Azim F. Shariff and Kathleen D. Vohs assert that a survey revealed that “the more people doubt free will, the less they favor ‘retributive’ punishment” and indicate that the notion of free will is necessary to social order. What constitutes human freedom is a complex matter, fraught with ambiguities that have been debated for millennia. The authors don’t clarify the survey’s questions....

Counterfeit electronics embedded in missile guidance systems and hundred-million-dollar aircraft have become a serious problem for the U.S. military and its contractors. Unlike a knockoff Gucci purse or Rolex watch, however, it takes more than misspelled brand labels, altered logos or suspiciously low prices to spot a bogus microprocessor being passed off as the real thing. Phony components create safety and security problems because little is known about who actually made them and, therefore, whether they might have been programmed with malicious software that could be used to disable flight, radar or weapons controls, or enable hackers to intercept communications....

What are the most intelligent creatures on the planet? Humans come first. (Though there are days when we have to wonder.) After Homo sapiens, most people might answer chimpanzees, and then maybe dogs and dolphins. But what of birds? The science writer Jennifer Ackerman offers a lyrical testimony to the wonders of avian intelligence in her new book, “The Genius of Birds.” There have long been hints of bird smarts, but it’s become an active field of scientific inquiry, and Ackerman serves as tour guide....

The top 10 most popular stories published in 2012: Men and Women Can’t Be “Just Friends” The World’s Last Worm: A Dreaded Disease Nears Eradication NASA Crushes 2012 Mayan Apocalypse Claims How Hollywood Is Encouraging Online Piracy Scientists Discover Children’s Cells Livingin Mothers’ Brains Psychiatry’s “Bible” Gets an Overhaul “Once in a Civilization” Comet to Zip Past Earth Next Year The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance Obama and Romney Tackle 14 Top Science Questions...

In 1999 the late Douglas Adams penned a column for London’s Sunday Times on gripes about the nascent Internet. “Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet,’” he wrote. “We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs.” Our cover story, entitled “Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2019,” showcases diverse inventions that our editors hope one day will become as common as chairs....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. After decades of unbridled enthusiasm—bordering on addiction – about all things digital, the public may be losing trust in technology. Online information isn’t reliable, whether it appears in the form of news, search results or user reviews. Social media, in particular, is vulnerable to manipulation by hackers or foreign powers. Personal data isn’t necessarily private....

When you ask for opinions about what future humans might look like, you typically get one of two answers. Some people trot out the old science-fiction vision of a big-brained human with a high forehead and higher intellect. Others say humans are no longer evolving physically—that technology has put an end to the brutal logic of natural selection and that evolution is now purely cultural. The big-brain vision has no real scientific basis....

“Many people don’t realize that there are math questions that we don’t know how to answer,” says mathematician Melanie Matchett Wood of Harvard University and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. She recently won a MacArthur Fellowship (or “genius grant”) for her work seeking solutions to some of those open problems. The award honors “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals” with an $800,000 “no strings attached” prize. Wood was recognized for her research “addressing foundational questions in number theory,” which focuses on whole numbers—1, 2, 3, and so on, rather than 1....

By Laura Zuckerman SALMON Idaho (Reuters) - In nine years of battling wildfires across the Western United States, Edmund Howick has mourned a fallen fellow firefighter and hiked a mountain hauling nearly 100 pounds (45 kg) of equipment on his back to escape a blaze that heralded its advance with a roar. The risks were already high when Howick, now 31, joined the U.S. Forest Service. But with chronic drought parching much of California, New Mexico and Arizona, tens of thousands of acres already scorched and scores of homes destroyed so far this year across the West, the dangers have only become worse....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Hopes for fewer large wildfires in 2018, after last year’s disastrous fire season, are rapidly disappearing across the West. Six deaths have been reported in Northern California’s Carr Fire, including two firefighters. Fires have scorched Yosemite, Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Sequoia and Grand Canyon national parks. A blaze in June forced Colorado to shut down the San Juan National Forest....

Few animals appear more affectionate than the black-browed albatross. These large seabirds, whose dark eyebrows shadow their eyes like mascara, are socially monogamous and often mate for life. Their romantic-seeming “marriages” have a practical purpose: staying with the same partner builds trust, which is essential as the pair alternates between lengthy foraging trips and egg-incubation duties. But “divorce” is not unheard of. As is the case with other monogamous animals, a female albatross will leave a partnership that lacks breeding success....

In the 1980s, the Chinese city of Shenzhen had some 300,000 mostly impoverished inhabitants. Today that city, the first to experience China’s reforms and economic opening, has more than 15 million residents and also hosts another first in China’s history—a carbon market. Shenzhen’s market to reduce global warming pollution covers some 620 manufacturers and other industries that collectively grew by 9 percent in 2013. The buying and selling of permits to emit carbon dioxide pollution resulted in a drop of 500,000 metric tons in the manufacturing sector and swapping cleaner energy for coal reduced carbon dioxide emissions by an additional 2 million metric tons for the entire city....

Late on Tuesday evening, Elon Musk, the charismatic and eccentric CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, took to the stage at the California Academy of Sciences to make a big announcement. This time, he was not unveiling a new rocket or electric car but a system for recording the activity of thousands of neurons in the brain. With typical panache, Musk talked about putting this technology into a human brain by as early as next year....