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The 1930s and early 1940s were a good time to fish for sardines off California. Catches soared in a boom that was centered on Monterey Bay and supported the state’s flourishing economy. But the tides began to turn in 1946, and sardine catches eventually fell from an average of 234,000 tons to just 24,000 tons. The industry went belly-up. Scientists have speculated for decades about what factors drove this infamous boom and bust, but they lacked data to test their theories....

SEX CRIMES evince such strong feelings of revulsion and repugnance that it is perhaps not surprising that people misunderstand their nature. The public, whose opinions are reinforced by portrayals in the media and in popular culture, believes that sex offenders will almost always repeat their predatory acts in the future and that all treatments for perpetrators are ineffective. The truth is not so cut and dried—and gives us cause for hope in certain cases....

As forest landowners shift their attention away from logging toward more lucrative—and destructive—uses such as suburban development, forest conservation is more crucial than ever. Historically, protecting woodlands has been a slow and difficult process: conservationists raised large sums of money, bought big tracts, and put them into public ownership with strict rules against intrusions. Recently, however, a handful of organizations have found an easier way: buy the land with loans and repay them by turning the forest into a nonprofit business....

Almost a year after the Drug Enforcement Administration announced it would consider granting additional licenses to cultivate cannabis for research purposes—and despite drawing 25 applicants so far—the agency has yet to greenlight a new grow operation. The DEA says it does not have a timeline to approve or deny applications and noted that it is dealing with a new review process. All applicants remain under review and none has been rejected, said Katherine Pfaff, a DEA spokeswoman....

Infant mortality has continued to drop in the U.S. during the past several decades. But stillbirths—when a fetus dies after 20 or more weeks of gestation—have remained relatively steady—and account for almost as many deaths as those of babies who die before their first birthday. About one in every 160 pregnancies in the U.S. ends in a stillbirth, which adds up to about 26,000 each year nationwide. Two new studies, published online Tuesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association, have analyzed data from large populations of still and healthy births in an effort to search for new causes—and to start to bring the mortality rate down....

For generations, Yupik and Inupiat hunters have depended on the Pacific walrus. They ate the walrus’ meat and whittled its bones into tools. Walrus skin covered their boats, and walrus intestines, stitched into raincoats, covered their backs. Today, the walrus is still an important part of the subsistence diet in villages along Alaska’s Chukchi and Bering sea coasts, and Native Alaskans sell handcrafts made from walrus ivory. But as the Arctic warms, the landscape upon which both walruses and people depend is changing....

The Pacific fisher, a house-cat-size member of the weasel family, lives in some of California’s remotest forests. Trapping and logging going back to the 1800s had reduced the fisher’s U.S. population to a few thousand at most. Those threats waned, but a new one has emerged: pesticides used at illegal marijuana farms. Thousands of these sites have popped up statewide, particularly in national forests, despite the potential to grow legally under California’s 1996 medical marijuana law....

Hey, Google, what’s the weather? We have become comfortable with the idea that we can make decisions based on accurate weather forecasts for the next three, five or seven days. Families plan cookouts for the upcoming weekend. Citrus farmers protect orange trees if a freeze is coming. Emergency managers evacuate towns that will be downwind of wildfires. Communities along rivers prepare sandbags to line homes and businesses if heavy rain looms....

Retroviruses probably evolved roughly half a billion years ago, making this medically and economically important group of viruses five times older than scientists previously thought. The finding, which is based on an analysis published on January 10 in Nature Communications, indicates that retroviruses moved with their vertebrate hosts from the ocean to dry land. Using new mathematical techniques to calculate the age of an ancient line of retroviruses called foamy viruses, which infect species ranging from lemurs to fish, the researchers worked out that retroviruses first evolved between 460 million and 550 million years ago....

Congress appears highly unlikely to overhaul the National Flood Insurance Program despite promises early this year that lawmakers would approve major changes to make premiums more affordable and improve the maps that define the nation’s flood zones. NFIP is scheduled to expire May 31, which will force Congress to renew the program unchanged for the 11th time in two years. If Congress does not act, the program will expire, preventing policyholders from renewing their insurance policies and blocking others from buying new policies....

The Internet may not consume nearly as much environmentally unfriendly fossil fuel as airplanes or automobiles, but the growth of cloud-based services offered by Apple, Netflix and others is forcing data centers to provide greater speed and more storage capacity. All of this size and speed comes at a price. Data centers generate a lot of heat that has to be whisked away by power-hungry air and liquid-cooling systems to keep the Internet’s engines from burning themselves out....

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity went into a precautionary “safe mode” over the Fourth of July weekend, but the robot is currently stable and communicating with its handlers back on Earth, space agency officials said. Curiosity put itself into the minimal-activity safe mode on Saturday (July 2), for reasons that engineers are still trying to tease out. “Preliminary information indicates an unexpected mismatch between camera software and data-processing software in the main computer,” NASA officials wrote in a status update today (July 6)....

At the start of the 20th century, Fossil Creek was a spring-fed waterway sustaining an oasis in the middle of the Arizona desert. The wild river and lush riparian ecosystem attracted fish and a host of animals and plants that could not survive in other environments. The river and its surrounds also attracted prospectors and settlers to the Southwest. By 1916 engineers had dammed Fossil Creek, redirecting water through flumes that wound along steep hillsides to two hydroelectric plants....

Alcoholics have trouble understanding jokes, but they may be missing out on much more than a chance to laugh. German neuroscientists showed 29 alcoholics and 29 healthy control subjects the introduction to a joke and then a choice of punch lines—only one of which made logical sense and was funny. Whereas 92 percent of the nondrinkers chose the correct punch line, only 68 percent of the drinkers did. “The ability to understand jokes is an example of complex social cognition,” explains Jennifer Uekermann of Ruhr University Bochum....

Advocates of electric cars want to tear down barriers that make the vehicles less accessible to some drivers — including those in communities hit hardest by air pollution. Disadvantaged populations, including low-income communities, have unequal access to the technology, according to a new report from the Sierra Club and Plug in America, a nonprofit group that promotes electric vehicles. For one thing, low-income drivers often live in multi-unit dwellings, whose building codes would need to be updated to accommodate EV charging spaces....

LONDON – One of the driest spring seasons on record in northern Europe has sucked soils dry and sharply reduced river levels to the point that governments are starting to fear crop losses and France, in particular, is bracing for blackouts as its river-cooled nuclear power plants may be forced to shut down. French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire warned this week that the warmest and driest spring in half a century could slash wheat yields and might even push up world prices despite the U....

Care for some wine with that heavy metal? Researchers report this week that potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals exist in more than 100 types of red and white wines from a dozen countries. British scientists say the wines (their brands and grape type aren’t identified) contain amounts of the industrial metals vanadium, copper and manganese that exceed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health standards, according to their analysis in Chemistry Central Journal....

Several years after scientists thought they had put the problem to rest, they have once again discovered increasing concentrations of mercury, this time in rainwater. “It’s a surprising result,” says David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may not necessarily be the case.” The results, recently published in Science of the Total Environment, is surprising because long-term trends had shown a decrease in mercury emissions whereas data collected between 2007 and 2013 indicate an unsettling upturn from the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest....

Scientists think rocks from space may be responsible for the very oldest rocks on Earth. That’s according to new research published today (Aug. 13), which argues that meteorite bombardment is the most likely way to explain the temperature and pressure conditions under which 4.02-billion-year-old Canadian rocks formed. “We believe that these rocks may be the only surviving remnants of a barrage of extraterrestrial impacts which characterized the first 600 million years of Earth’s history,” lead study author Tim Johnson, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, said in a statement released by the hosts of the Goldschmidt conference being held Aug....

In recent years people have increasingly been using the Internet to search for compatible partners—and a new study reveals that marriages that begin this way may be stronger. In a study that was by far the largest of its type, social neuroscientist John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago and his colleagues reported in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that more than a third of 19,131 American adults who married between 2005 and 2012 met their spouse online....