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Waste Management Inc. is teaming with a startup, InEnTec, to commercialize a technology that turns waste into energy. The new joint venture, S4 Energy Solutions, which was unveiled late last month, will try to commercialize plasma gasification technology developed in the 1990s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The technology uses both traditional gasification and a high-temperature plasma arc to produce synthesis gas, which can replace natural gas in electricity generation and chemical production....

In July, an international team of researchers reported that they had used gene therapy to correct a fatal brain disorder in mice — before the mice were even born1. The mice had a defect in a gene known as GBA, which encodes an enzyme responsible for breaking down a fatty molecule called glucocerebroside. Without the enzyme, glucocerebroside builds up in the brain, causing irreversible brain damage. The mice typically die within about 14 days of birth....

Termites can create mounds that are hundreds of times their own size, working independently without communication or a leader. Inspired by the creatures, scientists have created robots that use just a few simple rules and environmental cues to build castle-like structures and pyramids. The robots all work independently. Each travels along a grid and can move, climb a step and lift and put down bricks. And they use sensors to detect other robots and existing bricks, and react to these stimuli according to a simple set of rules, such as when to lay a brick or climb a step higher....

For the fourth consecutive year, U.S. automakers have exceeded the federal government’s requirements for greenhouse gas emissions, and they have also achieved record fuel efficiency. In two reports released last month, the EPA said that manufacturers had surpassed the emissions standards for 2015 passenger vehicles by an average of 7 grams of CO2 per mile. At the same time, fuel economy rose to an all-time high of 24.8 miles per gallon average....

People in public health hate H3N2 flu seasons, like the one gripping most of North America right now. So do folks who work in hospitals and in the care facilities that look after the elderly. To put it flatly, H3N2 is the problem child of seasonal flu. It causes more deaths than the other influenza A virus, H1N1, as well as flu B viruses. It’s a quirky virus that seems, at every turn, to misbehave and make life miserable for the people who contract it, the scientists trying to keep an eye on it, and the drug companies struggling to produce an effective vaccine against it....

Trusting the scientific process is undeniably the right thing to do when trying to make good decisions in a complicated world. But it can also be no fun. Many of the truths science reveals—that burning fossil fuels harms the environment, that smoking cigarettes causes cancer—are real bummers. Wouldn’t it be fun to side against the scientific consensus for once? If you feel exhausted from constantly taking the high road, The Playbook offers an enticing alternative....

Back in 2010, we celebrated the life of Martin Gardner, who died that year at the age of 95. He wrote the Mathematical Games column for Scientific American magazine for nearly 25 years, and he remains the gold standard for this publication’s columnists. Upon Gardner’s death, I interviewed his friend and protégé Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. The book came out in 1979, when Hofstadter was 34....

The Konya Plain in central Turkey is a vast, elevated plateau covered in small farms and dusty fields, edged by dramatic mountain ranges that cast purple shadows. At night, visitors can drive into the foothills and see distant city lights, shimmering like a mirage. The view here has not changed much over the past 9,000 years—even the illuminated metropolitan skyline would look familiar to a visitor from 7,000 B.C.E. That is because the Konya Plain is one of the cradles of urban life....

The true cost of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will be 300 million premature deaths and up to $100 trillion (£64 trillion) lost to the global economy by 2050. This scenario is set out in a new report which looks to a future where drug resistance is not tackled between now and 2050. The report predicts that the world’s GDP would be 0.5% smaller by 2020 and 1.4% smaller by 2030 with over 100 million premature deaths....

While the steady disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic has been one of the hallmark effects of global warming, research shows it is not only covering less of the planet, but it’s also getting significantly thinner. That makes it more susceptible to melting, potentially altering local ecosystems, shipping routes and ocean and atmospheric patterns. New data compiled from a range of sources—from Navy submarines to satellites—suggests that thinning is happening much faster than models have estimated, according to a study aiming to link those disparate data sources for the first time....

NEW ORLEANS—When NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft arrives at its next destination in 2019, it may find more primordial objects than NASA had anticipated: Researchers have announced that the probe’s next target, an icy object known as 2014 MU69, may have at least one moon and could even host a swarm of natural satellites. “It is very exciting,” New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Colorado, told Space....

Across the East China Sea, west of Japan and its ongoing crisis, sits the growing Qinshan nuclear power plant, where four new pressurized-water reactors are under construction in addition to the five already operating on-site. The Qinshan addition is one of 20 new nuclear power plants undergoing construction or approved for construction in China today, part of a bid to increase the nuclear share of China’s electricity-generating capacity from less than 2 percent to 5 percent....

By Karen BrooksAUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Holiday travelers heading home for Christmas face some rough going this weekend as a winter storm threatens tornadoes, floods, snow and ice for a wide swath of the United States.Forecasters are predicting up to a foot of snow for some parts of the Midwest, while other states slightly to the east already have flood watches in effect.Tornadoes are threatened along the central Gulf Coast on Saturday night, according to the National Weather Service, which is also predicting heavy snow for northern New EnglandFurther south along the East Coast, where temperatures could reach record highs of 60 to 70 degrees Fahrenheit (16-21 C) over the weekend, travelers would do well to get in most of their road time before a cold front hits the region on Sunday evening, according to Accuweather....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Genetic engineering, the search for dark matter, quantum computing and communications, artificial intelligence, brain science—the list of potentially disruptive research goes on. Each has significant implications for future industries, defense technologies and ethical understandings of what it means to be human. And, increasingly, the notable achievements in these fields are coming not from the great centers of science in the West, but Beijing, Shanghai, Hefei, Shenzhen and a number of other Chinese cities that make up China’s extensive research system....

You may well have been having conflicted feelings over the last couple of years. On the one hand, you know that Google is, at its core, an engineering company whose aim is to get your hands off the steering wheel and implant its search engine into your brain. On the other, you’re finding yourself feeling rather warm about Google, as if whatever the company says ultimately sounds mellifluous – even if, at heart, it’s menacing to your very being....

PROFILE NAMESKlaus Jacob TITLESpecial research scientist LOCATIONLamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University City and state leaders on the U.S. East Coast are talking about putting barriers outside of New York City and other places. Will those work? Barriers are not sustainable structures for more than 100 years, so they will not be sufficient for, say, 500 years of sea-level rise. Barriers can work, but you should only build them if you have [a plan to update them]....

In the 4.6 billion years since our solar system formed, life could have emerged on several of its worlds. Aside from Earth, however, Jupiter’s moon Europa seems to be the most likely to host it today. Early Venus and Mars probably had abundant liquid water, the essential elixir for life as we know it, but one became a hot hell and the other a frozen globe. Saturn’s moon Enceladus also has a substantial reservoir of liquid water, but the U....

When President Barack Obama promised change, he put two kinds on the agenda. The first was substantive change: reforms to key sectors of the economy, such as health care, climate change, financial markets and arms procurement. The second was process change: improvements to how public policies are shaped and how decisions over public funding are made. Against the odds, the Obama administration is making some progress on the first—but at the sacrifice of the second....

An Elemental Effect on Mental Health Zinc, copper, iron—these and many other elements play a crucial role in health and sickness. Beyond the well-known toxic effects of lead, it can be difficult to determine the precise impacts of these metals because they interact with one another and with many types of molecules found in our body. Recent research has led to some key insights, however, which may lead to new treatments for mental illnesses....

The tally of potentially habitable alien planets may have to be revised downward a bit. To date, NASA’s prolific Kepler space telescope has discovered about 30 roughly Earth-size exoplanets in their host stars’ “habitable zone”—the range of orbital distances at which liquid water can likely exist on a world’s surface. Or so researchers had thought. New observations by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft suggest that the actual number is probably significantly smaller—perhaps between two and 12, NASA officials said today (Oct....