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By Ken Wills KAPAAU Hawaii (Reuters) - As Tropical Storm Iselle pushed past Hawaii late on Friday, thousands of residents raced to clear debris and restore power before another, more powerful hurricane threatened to drench the islands again within days. Iselle had weakened into a tropical storm before reaching Hawaii and officials said it was blunted to some extent by the archipelago’s mountainous Big Island, though high winds and heavy rain still lashed smaller islands in the chain....

The average U.S. household has to pay an exorbitant amount of money for an Internet connection that the rest of the industrial world would find mediocre. According to a recent report by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, broadband Internet service in the U.S. is not just slower and more expensive than it is in tech-savvy nations such as South Korea and Japan; the U.S. has fallen behind infrastructure-challenged countries such as Portugal and Italy as well....

It didn’t happen during his appearances on Stephen Colbert’s show or his walk down the red carpet in April as one of Time’s 100 most influential people of 2017. It has happened during meetings, seminars, and panel appearances from Beijing to Boston: Renowned biologist George Church nodded off. It’s no secret that he has narcolepsy, the condition defined by sudden bouts of sleep. He lists it as part of his personal history, intriguing his fans enough that “How does George Church manage his narcolepsy?...

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - Thirteen workers have tested positive for radiation exposure tied to an accidental release earlier this month of high levels of radiation in an underground nuclear waste repository in New Mexico, the U.S. Department of Energy said on Wednesday. No workers were underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Project in southeastern New Mexico when air sensors half a mile below surface in an ancient salt formation triggered an alarm on February 14 indicating excessive amounts of radioactive particles....

As autumn slides into winter every year, many birds in Europe and Asia pack up and fly south to bask in the tropical African sunshine. When spring rolls around, they return to the temperate Palearctic zone to mate and raise their offspring. Researchers wanted to know why these long-distance fliers do not get travelers’ flu. “When we go abroad on holiday, we need all sorts of vaccinations,” says Emily O’Connor, an ecologist at Lund University in Sweden....

Fishing captain Brett Greco has spent nearly half his life guiding anglers in pursuit of tarpon, bonefish, snook, redfish, permit and sea trout in the rich waters of Florida Bay. “You could go fishing 100 days for 100 different things here,” the 40-year-old says. But the bay’s fish population plummeted after a huge die-off of seagrass in 2015, taking a bite out of Florida Keys fishing businesses such as Greco’s for the better part of two years....

Virtual worlds offer millions of online visitors the chance to ride a dragon or build a fake real estate empire. Addiction researchers have discovered that these communities can also produce something very real—drug cravings—which may help scientists develop and test new treatments for substance abuse. Researchers have struggled for decades with the problem of reproducing so-called environmental cues within the confines of a sterile lab environment. These reminders—a rolled-up dol­­lar bill, the smell of cigarette smoke—make users crave their drug of choice....

Thirty years and more than a degree Celsius of warming later, humanity has yet to seriously deal with the planet’s climate problem. Heat-trapping greenhouse gases continue to build up in the atmosphere, and the U.S. government has failed to take meaningful action to curb them. And in addition to climate change, McKibben now sees two other existential threats facing humanity: artificial intelligence and human genetic engineering. He writes about these issues in his new book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?...

It’s a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind David A. Rosenbaum Oxford University Press, 2014 Natural selection—the causal mechanism that Charles Darwin showed was responsible for the origin of new species—is difficult for many people to understand. It is not the simple linear kind of causation we see when the swing of a golf club sets a ball in motion. Linear causation is usually quick and obvious; selection by consequences takes time to work and is sometimes difficult to detect....

July’s lineup of Shark Week documentaries features an exploration of the toothy fish in the waters off Cuba, a relatively unstudied hotspot of shark biodiversity. The area has only recently been opened to a wide community of scientists because of a thaw in U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations. “Tiburones: The Sharks of Cuba,” to be aired July 7 at 10 P.M. on the Discovery Channel, follows a joint team of U.S. and Cuban marine biologists....

Mainland mammoths—once common in North America and Siberia—were done in as a species by a warming climate and human hunters some 10,000 years ago. Scattered smaller populations, on islands without predators, lasted another 6,000 years. Yet as a new study reveals, the last mammoths to inhabit Earth had a rather awkward evolutionary denouement—one that could serve as a guide to conservationists working to rescue dwindling species, and to those looking to bring back the mammoth itself....

On Monday 2 July, the CryoSat-2 spacecraft was orbiting as usual, just over 700 kilometres above Earth’s surface. But that day, mission controllers at the European Space Agency (ESA) realized they had a problem: a piece of space debris was hurtling uncontrollably toward the €140-million (U.S. $162-million) satellite, which monitors ice on the planet. As engineers tracked the paths of both objects, the chances of a collision slowly increased—forcing mission controllers to take action....

Right before dying, many people experience vivid and meaningful dreams and visions, according to accounts across cultures and throughout history. Yet little scientific research has investigated the phenomenon. A new study in the American Journal of Hospice & Palliative Care, the first study to focus primarily on the patient’s perspective, found that most of these dreams are a source of personal comfort. They bring about a sense of peace, a change in perspective or an acceptance of death, suggesting that medical professionals should recognize dreams and visions as a positive part of the dying process....

Another year of wild weather is behind us. But thanks to EUMETSAT, you can now relive it in amazing high-definition video from space. The new visualization uses geostationary satellite data from EUMETSAT, the Japan Meteorological Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to stitch together 365 days of data into one stunning highlight reel of 2015’s weather. And what a year it was. You’ll definitely want to keep your eye on the tropics throughout the animation as the northern hemisphere set a record for the most major tropical cyclones to form in a year....

For much of my time in public service, there were some things government officials did just because they were the right things to do—which included respecting the research done by government scientists. That respect has faded over recent presidencies; “Sharpie-gate” may have been its death knell. Our ability to keep the public safe and move the country forward economically rests, in large part, on federal research. But that work is being endangered by manipulation for political ends, and the ramifications are vast and should concern all Americans....

From political manipulation of COVID-19 research to censorship of weather forecasters who tried to contradict President Trump’s false claims about Hurricane Dorian, the Trump years were punctuated by jaw-dropping episodes of scientific misconduct. But those are just the cases that couldn’t be covered up. There were countless more that were never made public. That’s why we’ve set up a safe and confidential way to report issues, including those that may still be happening....

The famous opening words, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” of Charles Dickens’s 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities referred to the period of French Revolution. But he could equally well have been describing his contemporary Charles Darwin’s experience with his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin was born at the best of times in 1809 when conditions were highly conducive for his theory to flourish, but he died in 1882 at the worst of times because there was a real danger that it might soon be killed off....

But while global warming isn’t in the foreground of the Venezuelan story, it may be part of the backdrop. That’s because much of the country’s last decade has been marked by a severe and persistent drought, an occurrence that scientists say will become more frequent due to warming. Venezuela has also lost four of its five glaciers since the 1990s. Even many experts don’t often talk about this part. Several Washington, D....

Imagine you are on vacation and find yourself running low on a few necessities. You stop by a small convenience store to stock up and are immediately faced with the usual suspects: cramped aisles lined with chips and candy, a “beer cave” in the back, an oddly placed rack of discount t-shirts…and a lottery showcase behind the counter—a veritable gambler’s paradise. Normally you wouldn’t play; today, however, you’re overcome by the urge to try your luck....

Consider an hour without power, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, local time. Organizers say as many as 1.8 billion will join in the symbolic environmental event worldwide. But if you live in the US, your neighbors may think you just blew a fuse. Earth Hour starts in the mid-Pacific Islands on Saturday night, March 31 with an hour of voluntary electrical blackouts in Tonga. The event moves on to the western Pacific and Indian Oceans, where stars helping promote the event include an Australian model, an Indian cricket champion and a Russian heavyweight boxer....