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Editor’s Note: George W. Huber and Bruce Dale are chemical engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Michigan State University, respectively. In this article, a rough draft of which appears below, Huber and Dale point out that biofuels remain one of the most technically promising alternatives to oil. The key will be learning to convert cellulosic biomass (like stalks and stems, and unlike edible cereal corn, which is noncellulosic) into fuel....

Gut microbes deserve a lot of credit: They not only help digest our food, produce some nutrients, detoxify harmful substances, and protect us from pathogens—they are also important for the development of the immune system. Disturbances in the gut microbiota have been linked to allergies as well as disorders of the digestive and immune systems. Although intestinal organisms’ impact on the digestive system’s functioning is generally accepted, how they influence pathologies elsewhere in the body has remained a mystery....

American coastal communities will experience high-tide flooding as many as 270 days a year by 2050, according to NOAA projections released yesterday that show sea-level rise causing the dramatic increases. NOAA’s annual report on high-tide flooding—also called “sunny day” or “nuisance” flooding because it’s not related to storms—shows that records were set in the past year in one-quarter of the communities along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts where the agency has tide gauges....

Name: Greg Gage Position: Co-founder of Backyard Brains Location: Ann Arbor, Mich. When I was a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Michigan, we would record the brains of animals and try to figure out what the brains were doing. At the same time, we were going into classrooms and teaching neuroscience to kids. Tim Marzullo—now my business partner—and I noticed that there was a big difference between what we were doing in the lab and what was being taught....

Is Alzheimer’s disease an acquired form of Down syndrome? When neurobiologist Huntington Potter first posed the question in 1991, Alzheimer’s researchers were skeptical. They were just beginning to explore the causes of the memory-robbing neurological disease. Scientists already knew that by age 40, nearly 100 percent of patients with Down syndrome, who have an extra copy of chromosome 21, had brains full of beta-amyloid peptide—the neuron-strangling plaque that is a hallmark of Alzheimer’s....

On fourteen dry, flat square miles of California’s Central Valley, more than 8,000 horsehead pumps—as old-fashioned oilmen call them—slowly rise and fall as they suck oil from underground. Glittering pipelines crossing the whole area suggest that the place is not merely a relic of the past. But even to an expert’s eyes, Kern River Oil Field betrays no hint of the technological miracles that have enabled it to survive decades of dire predictions....

Dear EarthTalk: Has an alternative to air conditioning to keep rooms cool been invented that is significantly cheaper and/or uses significantly less energy than traditional air-conditioning?— Ashutosh Saxena, Allahabad, India Unfortunately the modern day air conditioner, with its constantly cycling, energy-hogging compressor and environmentally unfriendly chemical coolant, still reigns supreme throughout the world—and increasingly so in rapidly developing countries like India and China where possession of air conditioning connotes middle class status....

CLIMATEWIRE | Solar panels are getting their moment in the sun after President Joe Biden yesterday invoked the Defense Production Act to jump-start the renewable energy sector. But just as important — if less flashy — are two other things Biden’s order seeks to boost: heat pumps and insulation. Those products will be essential for decarbonizing the hard-to-reach building sector. And in the best-case scenario, experts said, Biden’s order could rejuvenate U....

The tableau is common enough these days: after a miscalculated meal, snack or sip, a parent rummages frantically for an EpiPen or antihistamine as a swollen-mouthed child sits, frightened, possibly gasping for breath. The prevalence of food allergies has shot up in recent years and now affects some 8 percent of children in the U.S. And of the approximately six million kids who have food allergies in this country, more than a third (38....

When French explorer Jean-Francois de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, and his crew were sailing along the coast of northern California on September 7, 1786, they spotted a smoky plume in the sky that looked like volcanic ash. The ship’s cartographers marked a volcanic eruption on their maps of the region. But volcanologists have puzzled over the plume. They have never found ash deposits that matched the eruption’s proposed dates, and no other records detailing the alleged eruption have surfaced....

California signaled yesterday it would sue the Trump administration to defend its ability to limit tailpipe pollution. It came a day after the White House abandoned talks with state officials over its plan to scrap the clean car rules. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) called the White House’s move part of an ongoing “retreat from our nation’s existing Clean Car Standards.” “Abandoning ship on the U.S.’s serious push to tackle pollution is another sign of impotence and fallibility, something Americans aren’t accustomed to,” Becerra said in a statement....

In the study, obese drivers — those with a body mass index (BMI) between 30 and 35 — were 20 percent more likely to die during a car crash compared to normal-weight individuals. Morbidly obese individuals — those with a BMI of 40 and above — were 80 percent more likely to die in a car crash. BMI is a ratio of weight to height and is considered an indicator of body fatness....

There are at least two bright spots in these strange times: Telescopes are still studying distant galaxies and penguins are still pooping across Antarctica. In both cases, if you’re looking for new ways to pass the time while you stay home, you can help out scientists studying these phenomena. Citizen science is nothing new, but it’s a particularly appealing option as the spreading coronavirus prompts containment measures around the world. So if you’d like to take your mind off current events for a while, consider chipping in on a research project....

By Courtney Sherwood PORTLAND Ore. (Reuters) - Record drought on the U.S. West Coast has exposed the ruins of an Oregon hamlet once submerged under the waters of a man-made reservoir, allowing a rare opportunity for an archaeological excavation, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation official said on Thursday. The tiny community of Klamath Junction was once home to two gas stations and a cluster of homes and other buildings that date back to the 1920s, but its residents were relocated and the structures inundated as part of a 1960 irrigation project that extended a reservoir known as Emigrant Lake....

By Magda Mis LONDON, Aug 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation)- If you recently bought a pair of jeans or ate a burger for dinner, followed by a nice cup of coffee, you probably didn’t link the touch of cotton or the aroma of the food to the amount of water that was used to produce them. It might be good idea to start thinking about it. There is more to a cup of coffee than just the 125 ml of water poured into a cafetiere: an astounding 140 litres of water is needed to grow the coffee beans for one cup....

You awaken in the middle of the night: that tooth that’s been a little sensitive lately is throbbing. By morning, you realize you have a real problem. So you head into the bathroom, plug your smart toothbrush into your smartphone—and when you put the brush in your mouth, it scans your teeth. The images automatically upload to the Cloud. They are analyzed by artificial intelligence, which finds a cavity in your aching tooth and a hairline crack in another molar....

As the nation watches the presidential election tomorrow, climate experts will be focusing on control of the Senate and whether Democrats can win a mandate to pursue ambitious climate legislation next year. With polls showing Democrats favored to capture the presidency and the House, climate experts and advocates say securing the Senate would give the party an unprecedented opportunity to enact groundbreaking legislation to cut emissions and enhance clean energy. “Almost everything is at stake with climate in the Senate,” said Michelle Deatrick, head of the Democratic National Committee’s Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis....

Alan Searleman, a professor of psychology at St. Lawrence University and co-author of the college textbook Memory from a Broader Perspective, explains. In the scientific literature, the term eidetic imagery comes closest to what is popularly called photographic memory. The most common way to identify eidetikers (as people with eidetic imagery are often called) is by the Picture Elicitation Method. In it, an unfamiliar picture is placed on an easel and a person carefully scans the entire scene....

A century ago the visionary bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich aptly coined that term to describe an immune system attack against a person’s own tissues. Ehrlich thought such autoimmunity–another term he coined–was biologically possible yet was somehow kept in check, but the medical community misconstrued his two-sided idea, believing instead that autoimmunity had to be inherently impossible. After all, what wrong turn of evolution would permit even the chance of horrendous, built-in self-destruction?...

We all have the power to improve our lives, even a little bit. Research shows that two hours a week in nature can reduce stress and blood pressure. Maintaining an active social calendar prevents cognitive decline, well into old age. And for some, regular strenuous exercise appears to stave off depression as effectively as some pharmaceutical treatments. In this issue, Scientific American column editor Daisy Yuhas spoke with Amanda Baughan, a researcher in computer and human interactions at the University of Washington about the ways that social media can detract from self-esteem and life satisfaction (see “Why Social Media Makes People Unhappy—And Simple Ways to Fix It”)....