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The United States committed today with other countries to stop financing fossil fuel projects abroad by the end of next year, in a seismic shift that could stem the construction of natural gas and oil facilities in lower-income nations. The pledge, announced at the global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, could take billions of dollars away from future fossil fuel production and redistribute it to low-carbon energy projects such as wind and solar....

Vaccines have disabled many childhood killers of the past and are poised to take out a number of less deadly diseases we have so far endured. But despite their availability, a new survey of states indicates that a million or more kids are not receiving new vaccines, because neither their insurance companies nor states will pick up the tab. Researchers report that 10 states between 2004 and early 2006 changed their rules to limit public purchases of selected vaccines for residents whose insurance policies do not cover vaccines and often carry high deductibles....

These aren’t blue flowers growing from soil. Rather they are crystals of silica and barium carbonate grown on the surface of a glass slide. Wim L. Noorduin, a postdoc at Harvard University, coaxes the crystals into forms that resemble leaves, stems and petals before photographing them through a scanning electron microscope. Afterward he adds false colors to the black-and-white images. The variations in form come from tweaks to the temperature, acidity or carbon dioxide content of a chemical solution....

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections. Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D....

As countries’ human life expectancy grows, so do their numbers of invasive and endangered species, according to a new study by University of California, Davis researchers. The researchers examined social, economic and ecological information for 100 countries to determine which factors are most strongly linked to endangered and invasive birds and mammals. Human life expectancy is rarely included in such studies but turned out to be the best predictor of invasions and endangerment in these countries, according to the study published in Ecology and Society....

In our search for cosmic signals of dark matter, we could be likened to drunkards looking for lost keys beneath lampposts, where the light shines the brightest. Here, the “lampposts” are regions of space teeming with galaxies and galaxy clusters, which are thought to be embedded in dense clouds, or “halos,” of dark matter. What if instead we trained our sights on cosmic voids—vast reaches of mostly empty space? In a new preprint study, a trio of researchers argue that while dark matter’s overall signal from these parts of the cosmos would be weaker, it would also be less contaminated by astrophysical sources and thus could be easier to spot....

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was in a bind. The world’s premier scientific body on the climate had found, in a 2013 report, that it is extremely likely (95 percent confidence) that human activities are responsible for most of the observed warming of global temperatures since 1951. The panel was more certain than it had ever been in the past. Yet the lay public did not seem to care. Polls have repeatedly shown that climate change is not a priority for most people....

NEW YORK – Disease has killed more than 90 percent of some bat populations in Northeastern states, according to a survey released yesterday by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The DEC survey in New York, Connecticut and Vermont examined 23 caves that are believed to have once been home to more than 55,000 bats, roughly 10 percent of the regional bat population. The culprit is “white-nose syndrome,” an ailment named for a white fungus found on afflicted bats....

The sun controls Earth’s climate, bathing us in light ranging from ultraviolet to visible that warms the planet and drives the heat engines we know as weather systems and ocean currents. The sun is changeable, cycling from maximum to minimum outputs over a roughly 11-year cycle, increasing or decreasing the amount of light that reaches Earth as a result of the poorly understood aspects of the sun’s seething nuclear fusion. Now new satellite measurements reveal that from 2004 to 2007—the declining phase of an unusually low and prolonged solar minimum—the sun put out even less ultraviolet light than expected but compensated by putting out more visible light....

Fatima Kamara survived Ebola. Now she cares for children as a nurse at an Ebola treatment center in Kenema, Sierra Leone. But Kamara’s neighbours are wary of her, despite her bill of good health. Some call her home the ‘Ebola compound’ and avoid taking water from her well. Kamara’s story is not unusual. Across Sierra Leone, Ebola survivors are working as nurses, caregivers, counsellors, organizers and outreach workers, seeking to halt the spread of the disease that threatened their lives....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineGiant pandas don’t digest bamboo by themselves. Microorganisms in their guts may help the endangered animals to subsist on plants despite a gut that is better suited to eating meat, finds an analysis published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.Pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) are among the pickiest eaters in the animal world. In the wild, they eat more than 12 kilograms of bamboo each day–and little else....

Inside a neutron star—the city-size, hyperdense cinder left after a supernova—modern physics plunges off the edge of the map. There, gravity squeezes matter to densities several times greater than those found in the nucleus of an atom, creating what theorists suspect could be a breeding ground for never-before-seen exotic particles and interactions. But densities this high cannot be probed by laboratory experiments, and remain too challenging for even today’s most powerful computers to tackle....

Acting out in school is often a prelude to parents receiving a call from the principal. But, there are ways of acting out that tremendously increase learning — namely acting out as a way of grounding, or making sense of, abstract information. There is a growing body of research showing the value of this sort of acting out. One example is the Moved by Reading intervention for teaching reading comprehension. Using the intervention, children act out the meaning of sentences by moving images on a computer screen....

Two articles in June proved to be not only provocative but complementary. “Doubt Is Their Product, " by David Michaels, discussed efforts by corporations and interest groups to employ their own research to undermine the science supporting product regulation. Many readers suspected they had found an example of such intentionally generated uncertainty in Obesity: An Overblown Epidemic, W. Wayt Gibbss report on assertions by researchers that the government, medical establishment and media are misleading the public on the health consequences of rising body weight....

From the COVID vaccine to pulsars to computer programming, women are at the source of many scientific discoveries, inventions and innovations that shape our lives. But in the stories we’ve come to accept about those breakthroughs, women are too often left out. Each season at Lost Women of Science, we’ll look at one woman and her scientific accomplishment: who she was, how she lived and what she found out. Katie Hafner, a longtime reporter for the New York Times, explains the science behind each woman’s work and explores the historical context in which she lived....

It is the nemesis of normal matter: antimatter. Like evil twins of ordinary particles, antimatter versions mirror their mundane counterparts in every way, except for having the opposite charge, and they promise violent annihilation if ever the twain should meet. Indeed, the conflagration of a single gram of antimatter particles merging with their normal matter siblings would release energy equivalent to about 40 kilotons of TNT, or enough to power nearly 5,000 households for a year....

For someone who died at the age of 32 the largely self-taught Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan left behind an impressive legacy of insights into the theory of numbers—including many claims that he did not support with proof. One of his more enigmatic statements, made nearly a century ago, about counting the number of ways in which a number can be expressed as a sum, has now helped researchers find unexpected fractal structures in the landscape of counting....

Those are the findings of research published Friday by a team of scientists at Sao Paulo State University in Brazil showing that the decline of large animals in tropical forests may be directly connected to the Earth’s ability to withstand climate change. Hunting and poaching threatens 19 percent of all tropical forest vertebrates, with large vertebrates, including frugivores, disproportionately favored by hunters, the study says. As the frugivore population declines—a process called “defaunation”—fewer seeds of carbon-dense trees are spread throughout the forest, study co-author Mauro Galetti, a Sao Paulo State University ecologist, said....

Ambulances are scarce in areas of west Africa roiled by the Ebola outbreak, so when ill patients and their families need to go to the clinic they often turn to the next best thing—a motorcycle taxi. An ill passenger will wrap her arms around the driver’s waist and away they will go—sometimes driving an hour or so to get to a nearby clinic. During the journey a weak patient, clinging to the driver, may expel diarrhea and literally drape herself over the driver even as her bodily fluids permeate the seat....

Medical researchers are poised to map the entire process of kidney stone formation for the first time, thanks to insights from an unlikely source: geology. Combining this framework with a suite of cutting-edge microscopic tools and a new device that grows kidney stones in the laboratory, they are developing novel ways to stop or slow down the stones’ growth. Stone disease occurs when jagged mineral crystals form in urine within the kidney....