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Tens of thousands of people have evacuated their land in Bali as the nearby volcano Mount Agung angrily spits ash and its magma rises. Many Balinese hold the mountain sacred and accept its occasional outbursts as moral admonishments whereas geologists consider this activity a routine part of Earth’s behavior. But scientists have found another force—climate change—affects the frequency of eruptions. Now a new study shows even relatively minor climate variations may have such an influence....

By Tom MilesGENEVA (Reuters) - Atmospheric volumes of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change hit a new record in 2012, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Wednesday.“For all these major greenhouse gases the concentrations are reaching once again record levels,” WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud told a news conference in Geneva at which he presented the U.N. climate agency’s annual Greenhouse Gas Bulletin .Jarraud said the accelerating trend was driving climate change, making it harder to keep global warming to within 2 degrees Celsius, a target agreed at a Copenhagen summit in 2009....

Editor’s Note (8/29/17): Scientific American is re-posting the following article, originally published September 9, 2016, in light of claims by South Korean and Japanese officials that North Korea fired a ballistic missile over Hokkaido, Japan’s second-largest island, early Tuesday morning. The missile flew about 2,700 kilometers before landing in the Pacific Ocean to the east of Japan. This was the third time North Korea has fired a projectile over Japan since 1998....

An ambitious project to relocate rhinos from South Africa to Australia has been accused by some conservation researchers of being a waste of money. The Australian Rhino Project charity, headquartered in Sydney, has attracted huge publicity for its plans to move 80 rhinos to Australia “to establish an insurance population and ensure the survival of the species”. It raised more than Aus$800,000 (US$600,000) in the year to September 2015, and hopes to start by flying out six rhinos later in 2016....

Edited by Dava Sobel As though time could have a hobby we speak in eigenvalues, the harmonious oscillations in the green flash before sunset. We interpret raised to the power to mean you were taken in by numbers as a young babe & your childhood can be classified irrational. Euclid, Euler, the empty set’s a nest atop a piling. If two words diverge on the open seas & the dot product is without derivative, the intercept can be found only by Venn diagrams on the tongue....

Dear EarthTalk: There has been a lot of news about lead-tainted children’s toys being recalled. Where are these toys ending up and are they creating pollution problems there? – Michael O’Laughlin, Tigard, OR The biggest problem with the recall of millions of lead-tainted toys over the last few years has been getting shops and consumers to comply. According to Mattel—which has issued dozens of recalls in recent years, including some 2....

Magnets are remarkable exemplars of fairness—each north pole is invariably accompanied by a counterbalancing south pole. Split a magnet in two, and the result is a pair of perfectly neutral magnets, each with its own north and south. For decades researchers have sought the exception to this rule of fairness and balance: the magnetic monopole. Magnetism’s answer to electricity’s negatively charged electron, a monopole would be a free-floating carrier of either magnetic north or magnetic south—a yin unbound from its yang....

Cities are famously sweltering places during heat waves, with pavement and buildings radiating heat back into the air and elevating temperatures compared to nearby rural areas. Add in global warming and an increasingly urban population, and you have a recipe for quickly ratcheting up the number of humans exposed to health-endangering heat. This exposure has tripled in recent decades—a faster rise than previous research suggested—a new study finds. In what the authors say is a first, the study has produced a city-by-city breakdown of how much of that increased exposure is a consequence of population growth, and how much is from physical heating (a combination of climate change and the so-called urban heat island effect)....

Many contagious diseases spread through carriers such as birds and mosquitoes. These vectors in turn move with heat and rainfall. With this in mind, researchers have begun to use satellite data to monitor the environmental conditions that lead to disease. “Ideally, we could predict conditions that would result in some of these major outbreaks of cholera, malaria, even avian flu,” says Tim Ford of the University of New England at Biddeford and co-author of a paper on the subject published this past September in Emerging Infectious Diseases....

“Why is it,” Joep Lange told an International AIDS Conference in the early 2000s, “that we are always talking about the problem of drug distribution, when there is virtually no place in Africa where one cannot get a cold beer or a cold Coca-Cola.” The Dutch clinical virologist — who was among the 298 passengers who died in the downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight on 17 July, and one of many headed to the 20th International AIDS Conference in Melbourne, Australia — worked since the early 1990s to deliver HIV drugs deep into the world’s poorest countries....

Alone amid the cosmic blackness, NASA’s Dawn space probe speeds beyond the orbit of Mars toward the asteroid belt. Launched to search for insights into the birth of the solar system, the robotic spacecraft is on its way to study the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, two of the largest remnants of the planetary embryos that collided and combined some 4.57 billion years ago to form today’s planets. But the goals of the mission are not all that make this flight notable....

Last November science educator Raven Baxter got a message from one of her former students. The student was studying for a final exam at S.U.N.Y. Buffalo State College and had questions about the immune system. Baxter—who will soon join the faculty of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine—decided to help. But instead of e-mailing the answers, she opened an app on her phone and wrote a song....

In the past few years millions of people around the world have radically changed their way of life to avoid contact with other people and, thus, the novel coronavirus. Despite social distancing, many have still gotten sick in part from other viral infections. That is because, as scientists are increasingly learning, many viruses are lurking quietly in the human body, hidden away in cells in the lungs, blood and nerves and inside the multitudes of microbes that colonize our guts....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Whenever I teach about memory in my child development class at Rutgers University, I open by asking my students to recall their very first memories. Some students talk about their first day of pre-K; others talk about a time when they got hurt or upset; some cite the day their younger sibling was born....

Jens Naumann was 17 when an accident sent a fragment of metal from a railway line flying into his left eye. Three years later, a metal sliver from a snowmobile clutch destroyed his right eye, plunging him into total darkness. Naumann’s book Search for Paradise recounts his desperate quest back to the light, primarily as biomedical engineer William Dobelle’s “patient alpha.” In the 1970s, Dobelle had shown that electrically stimulating visual brain areas (the visual cortex) caused people to perceive spots of light, or “phosphenes....

We’re used to thinking of black holes as places where gravity is so strong not even light can escape—where an unnoticed crossing by a hapless astronaut over an unseen and un-felt “event horizon” nonetheless means a point of no return. “According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, no signposts would mark the spot where the chance of escape dropped to zero,” writes physicist Joseph Polchinski. But in this issue’s cover story, “Burning Rings of Fire,” Polchinski paints a new picture, courtesy of his and others’ work in a discipline that Albert Einstein found vexing: quantum mechanics....

It is not often that a comedian gives an astrophysicist goose bumps when discussing the laws of physics. But comic Chuck Nice managed to do just that in a recent episode of the podcast StarTalk. The show’s host Neil deGrasse Tyson had just explained the simulation argument—the idea that we could be virtual beings living in a computer simulation. If so, the simulation would most likely create perceptions of reality on demand rather than simulate all of reality all the time—much like a video game optimized to render only the parts of a scene visible to a player....

The Himalayas distort Earth’s surface only about as much as a human hair would that of a billiard ball. Discerning such a minute effect on a planet orbiting another star might seem laughable—akin to perceiving the hair on the ball, with the ball on the moon. Nevertheless, two astronomers have proposed a way to detect mountains and other surface features on exoplanets. And as mind-blowing as that may seem, the researchers have even loftier goals in mind....

Some 3.2 million years after she died and 42 years after scientists discovered her fossilized bones, the autopsy results of the famous human ancestor known as Lucy are in. The findings bear on a long-standing question of just how committed Lucy’s species, Australopithecus afarensis, was to life on the ground versus in the trees. In 1974 paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, now at Arizona State University in Phoenix, and his then-graduate student Tom Gray found the first of Lucy’s bones eroding out of a hillside at a site called Hadar in Ethiopia’s remote Afar region....

Dear EarthTalk: Since Obama took office, have any new incentives been put in place for homeowners looking to increase energy efficiency and reduce the overall environmental footprints of their homes? —Rob Felton, Little Rock, AK In fact, yes. Homeowners can get up to $1,500 back from the federal government for any number of energy efficiency upgrades at home. If you upgrade to energy efficient insulation, windows, doors, heating, air conditioning or water heaters between January 1, 2009 and December 31, 2010, you are eligible for a tax credits of up to 30 percent of product costs....