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Each year, millions of visitors flock to Angkor Wat, an ancient temple in modern-day Cambodia. There, they marvel at the 900-year-old towers, a giant moat and the shallow relief sculptures of Hindu gods. But what they can’t see are 200 hidden paintings on the temple walls. New, digitally enhanced images reveal detailed murals at Angkor Wat showing elephants, deities, boats, orchestral ensembles and people riding horses — all invisible to the naked eye....

North American forests are full of nonnative insects—more than 450 species, by the latest available count. Most have done no obvious damage, but the few that have—such as the emerald ash borer, which is killing off its namesake trees, and the hemlock woolly adelgid, which is devastating eastern hemlocks—have remade entire landscapes, doing untold ecological and economic harm. People have tried for decades to understand why some introduced insects become pernicious invasive species while others apparently remain innocuous, but these efforts have been mostly fruitless....

Most people who are even a little bit concerned about their cholesterol know that there is a “good” kind—known as HDL—and a “bad” kind—known as LDL. Research has shown that the higher the amount of HDL and the lower the amount of LDL in the blood, the less likely a person is to suffer a heart attack or stroke. As for the one in six Americans with unhealthy cholesterol levels, well, they can always hope to change their luck with a cholesterol-changing medication or two....

Even the International Space Station has a local polling site, thanks to a Texas law that arranges special absentee ballots for U.S. astronauts who are in orbit on Election Day. In order to vote from space, astronauts request a special absentee ballot about six months in advance, according to NASA. On the big day, they file their ballot electronically through a protected system. The process has been in use since 1997, when a U....

Solar energy appears to be heading toward a global growth spurt, due to a combination of new technology and expanding reach to consumers as it becomes more competitive with the cost of traditional energy sources. One sign of the potential of new technology came from a Norwegian company, Ocean Sun, that announced this week that its floating solar panels—sized to fit in reservoirs for hydroelectric dams or on shallow offshore water near cities—have met Norway’s safety and environmental requirements....

LONDON – For those concerned about the impact of coal-burning power plants on the world’s environment, the good news seems to have been arriving thick and fast lately. In mid-July, the World Bank announced it was significantly scaling back funding for coal-fired power stations due to concerns about emissions and global warming. In future, said the bank, it would limit such financial assistance to “only rare circumstances.” Then the US Export-Import Bank announced it had decided not to support funding for a multi-million dollar coal-fired power plant in Vietnam....

When we learn, we usually begin with the basics and work our way up, mastering our do-re-mi’s before launching into an aria. But when people have difficulty speaking and understanding language after a stroke—a condition called aphasia—they seem to improve faster when they start at a harder level. Speech researcher Swathi Kiran of Boston University works with bilingual aphasia patients to help them relearn words. She has found that when pa­tients practice the language they speak less fluently, their vocabulary grows in both languages....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The aviation industry produces 2 percent of global human-induced carbon dioxide emissions. This share may seem relatively small—for perspective, electricity generation and home heating account for more than 40 percent – but aviation is one of the world’s fastest-growing greenhouse gas sources. Demand for air travel is projected to double in the next 20 years....

Fragments of a chemically primitive meteorite that landed near Murchison, Australia, in 1969 have long been known to harbor a variety of interesting compounds, including dozens of amino acids. But as analytic techniques become more sophisticated, the Murchison meteorite continues to reveal even more diversity and complexity in the early solar system, and new work by a team of European researchers is no exception. In the study, set to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analytical chemist Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin of the Helmholtz German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich and his colleagues used high-resolution mass spectrometry to look at the organic (carbon-based) content of three Murchison samples....

When it comes to infectious diseases, children get a tough deal. Not only do they spend all day in a school-shaped mixing pot of viruses and bacteria, they do not yet have the repertoire of immune defenses their parents have spent a lifetime building—which means that for most infections, from chickenpox to measles, it pays to be an adult. Influenza is a different story, however. Studies of the 2009 flu pandemic have shown that immunity against regular seasonal flu viruses tends to peak in young children, drop in middle-aged people and then rise again in the elderly....

First came canary in the coal mine. Now there’s the lizard on the wall Researchers have found that wall lizards may be reliable early detectors for toxins and other pollutants from onshore oil drilling activity. Environmental scientists from the University of Siena in Italy analyzed wall lizards captured at four sites downwind from the Monte Alpi Oil Center in Val d’Agri, an area in Italy’s southern Apennine mountains that holds substantial oil reserves....

Humans have long imagined what it would be like to see the world through different eyes. In Greek and Roman mythology, for example, the giant Argus Panoptes used his dozens of eyes to keep watch. The poet Ovid reported that they acted in independent pairs, with two at a time going to sleep while the rest remained alert. A smaller many-eyed mystery fascinates scientists today: members of the family Salticidae, or jumping spiders, with their front pair of large, round eyes and three smaller peepers on each side of their head....

Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood of Accra, Ghana, wasn’t a pretty place in 2006, but the rising flood of e-waste had yet to completely drown the dump in the middle of town in toxic pollution. Ghana now imports some 215,000 metric tons of European computers, cell phones, microwaves, refrigerators, televisions and other electronic goods, making Agbogbloshie the second-largest site for processing such e-waste in all of west Africa. It may yet take the title as largest because e-waste imports are expected to double by 2020....

President Trump’s top advisers will meet in the White House today to resolve a monthslong conflict about whether the United States should quit or continue with the Paris climate agreement. Trump’s team is split, and though there is some evidence that the pro-Paris contingent is on the ascendant, it’s unknown what the group will urge the president to do. “That could go either way,” said Jeff Holmstead, a former candidate for the top job in Trump’s U....

U.S. Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a sixth-term Republican from Washington State who is a climate change denier and an ardent opponent of regulations for greenhouse gas emissions, has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump for Secretary of Interior. If McMorris Rodgers is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, she would govern the management of more than 500 million acres of federal public lands, including more than 400 national parks. Perhaps most critically, she would oversee the development of many of America’s fossil fuels and renewables resources, including all of its offshore oil, gas and wind development....

Nine thousand years ago on the plains of central Turkey, a group of Neolithic people settled at the edge of a river. The town they built there–now known as Çatalhöyük (“chah-tahl-HU-yook”)–grew to about 8,000 people and 2,000 houses. Crammed within 26 acres, roughly the size of 24 football fields, the later town contained no streets; people had to move about on the roofs. When they entered the houses down a stairway from the roof, they descended into a domestic space that was full of painting and sculpture–primarily depicting bulls, deer, leopards, vultures and human figures....

Every winter, the Arctic Ocean’s sea ice cover reaches a peak and then declines with the onset of spring. That peak, recorded this year on Thursday, was the lowest seen in 37 years of record keeping, federal scientists said yesterday. Sea ice covered just 5.6 million square miles of the Arctic Ocean on Thursday, about 5,000 square miles less than the previous record set last year, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA....

LONDON – David Stainforth is a brave man. His mission is to try to remove some of the confusion over the climate debate by explaining why uncertainty has to be a part of the computerized climate models that scientists use to forecast the expected impacts of climate change, including more violent storms as well as more flooding and droughts. Stainforth, a climate modeler and senior research fellow at the London School of Economics, hopes that by coming clean on the degree of difficulty in making such predictions, he and his fellow climate scientists will find it easier to make – and win – the argument that prompt action now is not only necessary but the far cheaper alternative to inaction....

Countries around the world have been committing to ambitious measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions. New research shows they have further to go than they thought. The Rhodium Group released an analysis today showing that China, the world’s largest emitter, saw its 2019 emission levels exceed those of all developed countries combined to reach 14 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That’s about 27% of the global total. Over the past three decades, China’s emissions have more than tripled, Rhodium estimated....

On Sept. 15, 2017, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will take a suicide plunge into Saturn to avoid contaminating the ringed planet’s potentially habitable moons, Titan and Enceladus. Cassini’s fate is tied to the issue of planetary protection, which refers to the measures scientists and engineers take to minimize that chances that life-forms from Earth make it to other worlds. And with NASA’s Mars 2020 rover planning to cache samples to one day return to Earth’s labs, planetary protection also means making sure that our own world is safe from contamination by possible alien life....