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“Where shall we fly today, son?” “How about Sydney?” “OK. Strap yourself in. And don’t crash the plane like you did yesterday, alright?” This might be the typical evening conversation in the Aigon household. For Laurent Aigon, from Lacanau, France, has just spent the last five years building something few other dads have done: a 737 cockpit simulator, which he’s placed in his son’s bedroom. I am grateful to Gizmodo and its use of Google Translate for discovering this lovely story from the French publication Sud-Ouest....

Propeller wind turbines are the most common way of using one of the most abundant energy sources on Earth to generate electricity. The tall three-bladed fans are the ubiquitous symbol of wind energy, but they aren’t the only design on the market. Vertical axis turbines, where the rotating axis stands upright, have been around as long as their horizontal brethren but have failed to catch on at large scales. “The simple story is that the companies that were commercializing [vertical turbines] were unable to make the inherent advantages exceed the inherent disadvantages,” said Paul Veers, chief engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Wind Technology Center....

In 2020, astronomers thought they’d found something incredible: the second so-called Earth Trojan asteroid ever seen. Now, a new team of researchers has confirmed that it’s real. Trojan asteroids are small space rocks that share their orbit with a planet, circling whatever host star that planet does in a stable orbit. While we have spotted Trojan asteroids around other planets in our solar system and others, until now only one of these objects, called 2010 TK7, has been confirmed to orbit along the same path as Earth....

It is safe to bet that a flying motorcycle will never be a practical transportation option. Yet that has not stopped Samson Motorworks, a small engineering firm in California’s Sierra Nevada foothills, from playing the long odds. The company is building a prototype called the Switchblade Multi Mode Vehicle, and it hopes to sell a do-it-yourself kit as early as 2011. Sexy design and the promise of air-ground transport have kept alive dreams of a flying vehicle in every garage....

For doctors trying to treat people who have symptoms that have no clear cause, gene-sequencing technologies might help in pointing them to a diagnosis. But the vast amount of data generated can make it hard to get to the answer quickly. Until a couple of years ago, doctors at US Naval Medical Research Unit-6 (NAMRU-6) in Lima had to send their sequence data to the United States for analysis, a process that could take weeks—much too long to make pressing decisions about treatment....

A 1 degree Celsius rise in average global temperature could cause the number of acres burned annually in the U.S. West to rise by as much as 400, 500 or even 600 percent in certain regions, according to calculations made by the University of Washington and the U.S. Forest Service. Wildfires not only destroy property and habitat, they are extremely costly. Very large fires easily do more than $1 billion dollars in damage, according to the Insurance Services Office, which performs research for the insurance industry....

The scenes that played out at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday will forever live in infamy. As Congress prepared to certify electoral college votes and declare Joe Biden president-elect, thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building, vandalizing the halls and occupying the office of the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Photographs and video show a band of insurrectionists that is overwhelmingly White and male. They carried guns, Confederate flags, flags emblazoned with swastikas, QAnon placards, and, according to police, chemical irritants....

Six groups of seals threatened by shrinking sea ice are gaining new protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced late last week. NOAA will list as threatened two distinct bearded seal populations — one in the Beringia region, which includes Alaska, and one in the Okhotsk region of Russia’s far east — and three subspecies of ringed seals (Arctic, Okhotsk and Baltic). Another ringed seal subspecies found only in Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia will be listed as endangered....

The second of a two-part series on energy options. Click here for the first part. The Senate’s rare votes on climate change this week could spill into presidential election campaigns next year and pressure Republican candidates to explain their beliefs about climbing temperatures—and it might help them. With 15 GOP senators saying Wednesday that humans are having some impact on the climate, and with 52 Republicans rejecting the idea that it’s a “hoax,” the party’s White House hopefuls could be cast into a campaign season that features environmental issues more than any since perhaps 2008, according to several political observers....

On March 11 the World Health Organization officially designated the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. Defined as the worldwide spread of a new disease, such a declaration is the first to be made since the 2009 H1N1 swine flu. As of this writing, there have been approximately 336,000 confirmed cases of the new disease, called COVID-19, resulting in more than 14,600 deaths worldwide. Although a coronavirus—a family of viruses that cause illnesses ranging from the common cold to severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—had not previously triggered a pandemic, this is not the first time we have seen the global transmission of a serious disease....

KARATU, Tanzania – Dr. Frank Artress is loath to get into an arms race with mosquitoes. “You hate to drag out all the heavy poisons,” he says, standing in front of the medical clinic he and his wife built in this rural town. But to fend off the voracious insects and their payload of malaria parasites, he knows there are few other choices. Artress, a physician from California, frowns as he looks out over the tiny earthen houses straggled across the flank of the Ngorongoro Crater....

Spinal cord injuries and disorders afflict millions worldwide, from disabled veterans to people with neurodegenerative disorders such as Lou Gehrig’s disease, yet there is currently no way to repair a damaged spine. Geneticists at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle are hoping to change that by developing the first genetic encyclopedia of the spinal cord. The Allen Spinal Cord Atlas, which will be available online for free in early 2009, will map out which genes are active in which locations along the spine in mice, which share 90 percent of their genetic material with humans....

Chemicals in a Martian meteorite that were once held up as possible evidence of life on ancient Mars were more likely the product of heat, water and chemistry, according to a new study. Researchers from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and the University of Oslo in Norway reached that conclusion after comparing the four-pound (two-kilogram) extraterrestrial rock, ALH84001, with samples of earthly volcanic material—and discovering a matching pattern of minerals consistent with a chemical process that yields carbon compounds after rapid heating and cooling....

Scientists have released three studies that reveal intriguing new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Two of the reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals, among other goods, in Wuhan, China and a third suggests that the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled over from animals—possibly those sold at the market—into humans at least twice in November or December 2019. Posted on 25 and 26 February, all three are preprints, and so have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal....

Humanity’s environmental impact did not start with the bang of agriculture or industrialization but a whisper initiated long ago—one that scientists are finally learning to hear. New archaeological and paleoenvironmental findings now date human activity that transformed our natural surroundings to more than 80,000 years ago, after early modern humans settled on the northern shores of Lake Malawi at the lower tip of eastern Africa’s Great Rift Valley. These humans dramatically modified the landscape and ecosystem by burning forests to yield a sprawling bushland that remains today, according to a report published on Wednesday in Science Advances....

As children settle into their classrooms for the beginning of a new school year, parents steel themselves for the pending battle. Mothers and fathers know well that their youngsters would rather pay attention to one another than to the blackboard. But parents may not realize that the reasons children struggle with education lie deep in our evolutionary past. Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection provides a framework for organizing and understanding all living things....

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, said on Wednesday he would honor the intent of the U.S. biofuels program, but remained open to tweaking it. The Renewable Fuel Standard requires the EPA set annual quotas for the use of ethanol and biodiesel in transportation fuels. More than a decade old, the standard is fiercely defended by the U.S. corn industry that provides most of the ethanol, but it has been a source of frustration for oil refiners....

Republican candidates called the government “stupid” during their first debate, had testy exchanges on civil liberties, and said pimps and prostitutes are collecting public benefits. But they had nothing to say about the nation’s landmark climate plan introduced earlier this week. The introductory debate, preceded by predictions of wild behavior by Donald Trump, featured discussions about immigration, the Middle East and taxes. Energy policy was almost absent during the two-hour show in Cleveland, and none of the top 10 candidates mentioned President Obama’s controversial Clean Power Plan....

Suppose you wanted to teach children to play baseball or softball. How would you go about doing it? One approach might be to sit them down and start having them memorize the rules of the game, the dimensions of the field, the names and statistics of past players, and a host of other facts. You would stop teaching them periodically to review the material in preparation for multiple-choice assessment tests. The students who showed a great aptitude for memorizing large numbers of facts could go into honors classes where they would memorize even larger numbers of facts....

Joe Biden and his administration face the enormous task of repairing damage from a predecessor who was hostile to science, dismissed evidence, spread conspiracy theories and rejected reality itself. Meanwhile a plague is raging. The planet is warming. Social trust is abysmal; a substantial fraction of Americans have bought into the lie that Biden’s decisive win in the 2020 election was somehow fraudulent. Digging out of this hole will take years....