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Although many studies have examined the impacts of deforestation on the immediate vicinity of hydropower projects, less attention has been paid to its effects on a regional scale. In fact, earlier studies found that a loss of trees within the water basin of hydropower sites increased the energy-generating capacity of the dam in the short-term, because less trees were available to suck water from the ground and export it outside the watershed in a process known as evapotranspiration....

Cities were already known to retain more heat than the rural environments that surround them, but new modeling from researchers in the United Kingdom now suggests that urban areas are also more sensitive to changes in climate. Furthermore, they will experience greater increases in average temperature with rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide, and the cooling effects of night will become more of a memory than a reality. Meanwhile, Washington, D.C. – where Congress is debating over whether to pass a climate bill – is getting a memorable preview of what new computer models are predicting....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazineHuman embryonic stem cells that are potentially pure enough to be used in therapies have been deposited into the UK Stem Cell Bank, and will soon be available across Europe.To make ‘clinical-grade’ cells, scientists produced them without the use of any of the animal cells or products typically needed, and did so under certified manufacturing conditions. They are the highest-quality cells of their kind publicly available, says Peter Braude, a stem-cell scientist at King’s College London whose team derived them at an estimated cost of £3 million ($4....

Plans to build two working quantum computers are among the first winners to be announced in a €1-billion (US$1.1 billion) funding initiative of the European Commission. The Quantum Flagship was first announced in 2016, and on 29 October, the commission announced the first batch of fund recipients. The 20 international consortia, each of which includes public research institutions as well as industry, will receive a total of €132 million over 3 years for technology-demonstration projects....

After snapping the final piece into place with a satisfying “click” she feels through her spacesuit gloves, the astronaut pauses to appreciate the view. Her reflection swims before her in a silvery disk the size of three tennis courts; for a moment she feels like a bug floating on a darkened pond. Composed of hundreds of interlocking metallic hexagons like the one she has just installed, the disk is a colossal mirror 30 meters wide, the starlight-gathering eye of the largest space telescope ever built....

On the morning of September 16, 2013, a 34-year-old U.S. Navy technology contractor named Aaron Alexis shot and killed 12 people inside the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard before being killed by police. The media barrage that followed the shooting focused largely on Alexis’s credentialed access to a government facility and on the military’s process for vetting contractors. Less publicized was the fact that a month before, in the early hours of August 7, Alexis had picked up the telephone in a hotel room in Newport, R....

Gravitational waves have struck again. Scientists who in February announced their landmark discovery of these ripples in spacetime revealed on Wednesday that they had detected more—again caused by a pair of crashing black holes. The gargantuan gravitational forces involved when two such incredibly dense objects ram into each other are so catastrophic that they wrench spacetime out of shape, curving it in powerful waves that travel clear across the cosmos. This second find shows that the initial discovery was not a rare windfall, but rather a preview of many more to come, ushering in an era where astronomers can use gravitational waves, rather than light, to “see” black holes and other invisible components of the hidden universe....

An increasing number of cities are improving building efficiency in response to legislation or pressure from green organizations. Many are working with the U.S. Green Building Council to leverage the council’s LEED certification system, which codifies steps that can be taken in new and refurbished buildings to minimize environmental impact. Attaining LEED certification “isn’t niche anymore, it’s mainstream,” says Marie E. Coleman, council spokesperson. Some cities are even incorporating measures from LEED into their building codes to force change....

Late last year, studies showed that third shots (boosters) of COVID vaccines were effective at providing a little extra protection from infection — particularly in the face of the Omicron variant. Some countries are now offering fourth doses, but scientists say that endless boosting might not be a viable strategy, nor is it how these vaccines were meant to be used. “We’re in totally uncharted territory for vaccinology,” says Danny Altmann, an immunologist at Imperial College London....

Brain implants have been around for decades—stimulating motor areas to alleviate Parkinson’s disease symptoms, for example—but until now they have all suffered from the same limitation: because brains move slightly during physical activity and as we breathe and our heart beats, rigid implants rub and damage tissue. This means that eventually, because of both movement and scar-tissue formation, they lose contact with the cells they were monitoring. Now a group of researchers, led by chemist Charles Lieber of Harvard University, has overcome these problems using a fine, flexible mesh....

Now it appears that the assessment was too optimistic. The latest data from across the globe show that the planet is changing faster than expected. More sea ice around the Arctic Ocean is disappearing than had been forecast. Regions of permafrost across Alaska and Siberia are spewing out more methane, the potent greenhouse gas, than models had predicted. Ice shelves in West Antarctica are breaking up more quickly than once thought possible, and the glaciers they held back on adjacent land are sliding faster into the sea....

The Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009 to scour distant stellar systems for Earth-like planets, has yet to attain that lofty goal, but it is now returning a flood of data about all manner of planets outside the solar system. On June 15, the Kepler team released information on possible planets identified in the first month or so of the spacecraft’s three-plus-year mission—a massive set of more than 300 candidates that promises to significantly augment the known catalogue of extrasolar planets....

When octopuses go hunting for prey, they sometimes end up “dining” on members of their own species, and the cephalopods seem to have a taste for their victims’ arm tips. Divers have captured video of this octopus-on-octopus action in the wild for the first time on video. In a new study, researchers described three cases of cannibalism in the common octopus — Octopus vulgaris — recorded with a camcorder by scuba divers in Ría de Vigo, Spain, located on the northeastern Atlantic coast....

One of the advantages that CEOs and celebrities have over most people is that they don’t need to spend much time handling the uninteresting, time-consuming aspects of daily life: scheduling appointments, making travel plans, searching for the information they want. They have personal assistants, or PAs, who handle such things. But soon—maybe even this year—most of us will be able to afford this luxury for the price of few lattes a month, thanks to the emergence of an open AI ecosystem....

The development of COVID vaccines has spotlighted the ingenuity of 21st-century science. In a matter of months, researchers pinpointed the coronavirus’s spike protein, figured out how to provoke an immune response and produced vaccine candidates for trial. The inoculation, in its several forms, is being hailed as one of the greatest achievements in scientific history. But as we celebrate the power of targeted molecular biology, we should also continue to honor one of the most important pillars of scientific discovery: serendipity....

The cerulean warbler breeds in the mountains of West Virginia and Tennessee but winters far to the south in places like Venezuela and Colombia. Mining in the U.S. and the growth of coffee and cocoa plantations in South America are stripping away its habitats. All in all, 91 percent of 1,451 species of migratory birds are losing lands essential to their annual journeys, researchers report in today’s issue of Science magazine....

What can science reveal about our “character” — that core of good, or evil, that shapes our moral behavior? The answer, according to a new book, is that there may not be much of a core, after all. In “Out of Character,” scientists David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdelsolo argue that how we think about character — a conception that dates back to at least the ancient Greeks — is deeply flawed....

Like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Nathan S. Lewis has been giving a lecture on the energy crisis that is both terrifying and exhilarating. To avoid potentially debilitating global warming, the chemist from the California Institute of Technology says civilization must be able to generate more than 10 trillion watts of clean, carbon-free energy by 2050. That level is three times the U.S.’s average energy demand of 3.2 trillion watts. Damming up every lake, stream and river on the planet, Lewis notes, would provide only five trillion watts of hydroelectricity....

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla.—The home that Stanley Young and Rich Cusmano are building here will hover above an infinity pool, a shimmering glass-and-concrete icon of tropical luxury set on one of the coastal city’s scenic waterways. Anyone willing to pay upward of $4 million for such a showpiece will, of course, want some certainty about his or her investment. The home sits on a waterfront lot that was just 2.79 feet above sea level, on a street that already floods during extreme tides and in a region where climate change will fuel sea-level rise by as much as 10 inches over 1992 levels by 2030....

The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors by Ann Gibbons Doubleday, 2006 ($26) The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen Harvard University Press, 2006 ($25.95) In the early 1980s, when I studied anthropology, human fossils older than about four million years amounted to a few inscrutable scraps. Just as accumulating molecular evidence from humans and apes pointed to the period between four million to six million years ago as the likely time frame for when we and they last shared a common ancestor, the fossil side of the story abruptly ended....