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Welcome to “The End,” at least as we know it. The features here, from the September 2010 issue, cover a range of topics, such as the decomposition of human flesh, the disappearance of cultures, the Earth’s remaining natural resources, and apocalypse scenarios. You will also find links to our exclusive digital offerings as they go live, including an interactive, rich-media feature, as well as links to interviews about the issue on public radio’s The Takeaway....

Advances in 3D printing, new human-robot interactions, extreme customization and shale energy are just some of the elements that will shape the future of manufacturing. As Yogi Berra said, “the future is no longer what it used to be”. But he also said that sometimes it is just “deja vu all over again”. The future of manufacturing, like its past, involves astonishing changes. After all, etymologically, the term literally means handmade or handicraft....

Efforts to monitor changes to the climate for adaptation planning are woefully weak worldwide, according to a report by the United Nations and a coalition of agricultural nonprofits. There are inadequate meteorological and hydrological monitoring systems in place that could help farmers and ranchers better prepare for the onset of droughts and other harsh conditions, the U.N. says, warning that those deficiencies could threaten food supplies. The findings are part of the U....

HONG KONG—China will exclude additional coal-to-natural-gas projects from its coal industry’s next five-year development plan, according to local media reports. China Energy News, a state-run newspaper, cited a policymaker Monday as saying that China will complete the construction of approved coal-to-natural-gas plants but will not approve new projects until 2020, aiming to keep its coal-based synthetic natural gas production capacity to 15 billion cubic meters at the end of the decade....

On vital measures that predict later success in school and life, small children in the U.S. do worse than kids in comparable countries. This distressing information comes from an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study of five-year-olds. For years the OECD has been examining the academic achievement of 15-year-old students from around the world, and recently it extended this work to the younger group. On average, American children had lower literacy and numeracy scores, poorer self-regulation skills, and engaged in fewer acts of cooperation, kindness and other prosocial behaviors than did children in England and Estonia, the other countries studied....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). To distill a clear message from growing piles of unruly genomics data, researchers often turn to meta-analysis—a tried-and-true statistical procedure for combining data from multiple studies. But the studies that a meta-analysis might mine for answers can diverge endlessly. Some enroll only men, others only children. Some are done in one country, others across a region like Europe. Some focus on milder forms of a disease, others on more advanced cases....

After months of beating back Ebola from behind spacesuit-like protective gear, exhausted foreign aid workers in Liberia are beginning to pack up and go home. The final wave of Cuban workers in Liberia held its farewell ceremony last Monday. Only about 100 of the more than 1,500 U.S. military personnel deployed to help stem the epidemic are still in the country, and they are expected to leave by the end of April....

Whether they are advancing discovery or being applied to help address societal problems, the process and products of research offer tremendous human benefits. Maybe that is why I struggle to understand how the rise of populism, with the root of “popular,” coincides with a seeming increase in antiscience sentiments. Changes in U.S. leadership after the 2016 election have brought budget cuts and even the outright redacting of scientific information related to topics such as climate change....

The hollow Cola tree growing in a remote area of southeastern Guinea was once home to thousands of bats routinely hunted and killed by the neighborhood children. It was also a popular spot to play. A year ago, one child in particular lived within fifty meters of the tree: a two-year-old boy who died in December 2013 and later was identified as the first person in west Africa known to have developed Ebola....

A puzzle posed by segments of ‘dark matter’ in genomes—long, winding strands of DNA with no obvious functions—has teased scientists for more than a decade. Now, a team has finally solved the riddle. The conundrum has centred on DNA sequences that do not encode proteins, and yet remain identical across a broad range of animals. By deleting some of these ‘ultraconserved elements’, researchers have found that these sequences guide brain development by fine-tuning the expression of protein-coding genes....

By Steve Quinn AU Alaska (Reuters) - Alaska has banned fishing for king salmon in the Yukon River this summer, saying that runs could come in even lower than last year’s historically low numbers amid a 10-year decline. The state projected in its species management plan that king, or Chinook, salmon runs were expected to range from 64,000 to 121,000, with the high end still lower than most years this past decade....

The terrorist attack on the London subway system provoked calls from politicians for deploy-ment of new technologies that could warn of the presence of bombs before they go off. But a detector that can discov–er the presence of multiple types of explosives quickly, accurately and from a far enough distance to protect peo-ple and property does not exist. The nearest thing is a snif–fer dog, but a canine has a short attention span and needs frequent breaks....

On Romantic Love by Berit Brogaard Oxford University Press, 2015 ($21.95) In spite of what you may have heard, love—at least the healthy kind—is actually pretty simple. If you have strong positive feelings for someone, want to protect him or her, and want to be with him or her, you are feeling love. If you also feel, at least sometimes, that you want to be physically intimate with that person, you have crossed over into the world of romantic love....

For many years, the U.S. measured literacy simply by asking respondents whether they could read or write, an approach perhaps sufficiently adequate when most people worked with their hands. Using this method, the Census Bureau in 1969 estimated that illiteracy in the U.S. population age 14 and older was only 1 percent. In 1992 the U.S. Department of Education embarked on a more thorough analysis and mounted a landmark survey. It asked a representative group of 26,091 Americans to read several texts and then had them demonstrate that they understood the texts....

Emissions from the global transportation sector are expected to increase through 2050 unless world leaders institute legal and regulatory changes, the U.S. Energy Information Administration warned in a report released yesterday. Under current policies, the United States and the rest of the world won’t meet global emissions reduction targets that scientists say are necessary to curb the worst effects of climate change, it suggests. Transportation is the single-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and accounts for about a fourth of global emissions....

By Alla KatsnelsonGene therapy delivered to a specific part of the brain reverses symptoms of depression in a mouse model of the disease–potentially laying the groundwork for a new approach to treating severe cases of human depression in which drugs are ineffective. But the invasive nature of the treatment, and the notorious difficulty in translating neuropsychiatric research from animal models to humans, could complicate its path to the clinic.Many researchers believe that poor signaling of the neurotransmitter serotonin is responsible for causing depression, and common antidepressants act by increasing serotonin’s concentration....

From Nature magazine Trespassers on the mating grounds of male bumphead parrotfish soon learn a hard lesson. The reef-munching fish fend off competing males using aggressive headbutting — a form of behaviour that has never previously been seen in the species. A team of US researchers reveals the surprising finding in the journal PLoS ONE this week. Growing to a weight of more than 75 kilograms and up to 1.5 metres in length, the giant bumphead parrotfish (Bolbometopon muricatum) is one of the heftiest reef fish in the world — but also one of the most shy around humans....

Thanks to citizens everywhere, the world now recycles just over 50 percent of the paper it uses, according to various estimates. Reprocessing plants are sprouting widely. But trees will never be fully spared because of a quirk of wood fibers themselves. Virgin pulp is rich in water, which provides for ample hydrogen bonding that holds fibers together when made into paper. But each time a fiber is cleaned, de-inked and dried in a reprocessing plant, “only 80 percent of the bonds recover,” explains Yulin Deng, associate -professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology....

Since the SARS-CoV-2 variant known as B.1.617 was first reported in India late last year, it has spread to dozens of other countries—including the United States, Singapore and the United Kingdom, where it has become dominant in some regions. Researchers have since identified three subtypes, known as B.1.617.1 (the ‘original’ B.1.617), B.1.617.2 and B.1.617.3, each with a slightly different genetic make-up. They are now rushing to investigate these variants and work out how they might affect the trajectory of the pandemic in countries where they have gained a foothold....

India is pushing a global emissions monitoring system in Cancun talks that could become the centerpiece of a compromise with the United States if other developing countries sign on. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh is said to expect a “quid pro quo” from the United States to make the deal work, new documents show. In proposing a system that the United States and China might agree upon, Ramesh in no uncertain terms told U....