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You might assume that Chicago dislikes environmentalists, judging by the response they get along Michigan Avenue. They loiter on its crowded sidewalks, trying to stop people with the brightness of their T-shirts, the authority of their clipboards and the innocence of their question: “Do you have a minute to save the earth?” Almost no passerby has that minute, let alone $20 to donate to the cause. What most people have is a scowl, a dismissive wave of the hand and the accelerating stride of a running back....

With the Trump administration keeping noticeably mum on climate change throughout this year’s U.N. week, U.S. cities, businesses and states were busy auditioning for understudy. Cities including Boston, Los Angeles and New York City outlined plans to further the objectives of the Paris climate agreement. Corporations, too, voiced their support for climate action and opposition to the Trump White House’s decision to leave the Paris accord at forums hosted by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York and former Secretary of State John Kerry at Yale University....

Scientists published the first draft of the human genome nearly a decade ago, but the hunt for disease genes is far from over. Most researchers have focused on single changes in DNA base pairs (AT and CG) that cause fatal diseases, such as cystic fibrosis. Such mutations among the genome’s three billion base pairs don’t tell the whole story, however. Recently geneticists have taken a closer look at a genetic aberration previously considered rare: copy number variation (CNV)....

Key concepts Physics Sound waves Vibration Hearing Introduction Have you ever tried making “walkie-talkies” using a long piece of string and two tin cans? If you have, you know that they work surprisingly well—at longer distances you can hear people better through the cans and string than you can through the air! In this activity we’re going to use the same concepts to build a personal bell, one that makes sounds that only you can hear!...

It sounds like the far-fetched plot of a sci-fi thriller: Bad guys strike down a high-ranking politician or captain of industry by hacking into and remotely tinkering with his or her pacemaker, insulin pump, implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) or other medical implant. Unfortunately, new research shows such a scenario is no longer just science fiction. Scientists from Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Washington in Seattle say they were able to launch cyber strikes against and glean private patient data from an ICD’s communication protocol while testing the device’s safety and security....

The incredible energy unleashed by the magnitude-7.8 earthquake that hit Nepal on April 25 moved Mount Everest more than an inch. The world’s tallest mountain shifted 1.18 inches (3 centimeters) to the southwest during the quake, according to the state-run China Daily newspaper, which cited a new report by China’s National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation. The shift was a small leap back for the mountain, which has been creeping northeastward at a rate of about 1....

When bitter, cold winds whip around outside, it’s best to dress in layers to stay warm. But when you have to go out into the sweltering heat, social norms put a hard limit on the opposite strategy: You still have to wear one layer of clothing. A team of researchers at Stanford University may now have a strategy for keeping us cool with that one layer. They report a nanoporous fabric that could help our bodies cool themselves by allowing body heat to escape (Science 2016, DOI:10....

The Brain Electric: The Dramatic High-Tech Race to Merge Minds and Machines by Malcolm Gay Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015 ($26) In one of the most memorable scenes from the early Star Trek movies, Dr. Leonard McCoy confronts a 20th-century surgeon, who is about to drill holes in Enterprise navigator Pavel Chekov’s head, and gives him a dressing-down, roaring about the era’s primitive “butcher knives.” McCoy soon repairs Chekov’s badly damaged brain with a high-tech gizmo from the future that looks like an Xbox and doesn’t even break the skin....

Humanity’s complicated relationship with the opium poppy dates back to our earliest civilizations. Psychiatrist Halpern and writer Blistein trace the plant’s origins from ancient Mesopotamia to Greece to China, exploring how it became an effective medicine—and deadly drug. They weave together a history of the flower’s medicinal uses, the origins of the opium trade and drug wars, and the modern opioid crisis. It’s a story peppered with colorful anecdotes about Hippocrates’ use of the drug to treat pain and other ailments, the brazen drug abuser Alexander the Great, and the notorious 19th-century opium dens of San Francisco....

CLIMATEWIRE | The Supreme Court ruling last week that clipped EPA’s authority to regulate global warming pollution will likely open the door to a flood of challenges claiming government agencies are overstepping their mission to tackle climate change. The court’s decision saying that agency efforts to curb emissions from power plants is a “major question” that Congress did not give EPA the authority to handle has led to a debate over other regulations that may or may not fall under the same label....

At 2,000 pounds and six and a half feet in length, leatherback turtles are the largest living reptiles. Their size, however, belies their fragility: among the leatherbacks that live in the Pacific Ocean, populations have dropped by 90 percent in the past 20 years. Biologists already knew that fishing gear posed a problem for the endangered turtles, which can get entangled in trawlers’ nets, but they were not sure exactly where and when they were running into trouble....

Virgin Galactic rolled out the second-ever SpaceShipTwo today (Feb. 19) here at the Mojave Air & Space Port, a facility that lies in the shadow of desert mountains about 90 miles (150 kilometers) north of Los Angeles. The unveiling ceremony featured blaring music, deep blue lighting, cocktails and the company’s founder, Sir Richard Branson, riding atop the SUV that towed the vehicle into view. The voice of famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking boomed over a loudspeaker and revealed the brand-new suborbital commercial vehicle’s name—VSS (for Virgin Spaceship) Unity....

Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend. —Theophrastus (371–287 B.C.) Ancient philosophers were far from alone in their musings about time. Playwright Tennessee Williams wrote in 1944 that time is the longest distance between two places. And the years since have proved him right. Fast travel, instant communications and express deliveries between opposite ends of the world mean, more than ever, that time is not only relative but also an illusion....

The F-150 notwithstanding, Americans are choosing more efficient cars. George Will has been described as an “intellectual,” as “erudite,” “brilliant,”even “brainy.” If you’ve ever heard him on television, you’d have to admit that his opinion of his own intellect seems to be quite high. And yet for such an erudite and brainy fellow, it’s amazing how often he gets it wrong when it comes to things environmental. (No comment on his other positions....

By Janelle WeaverRemoving part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas.To investigate the neural basis of spirituality, Cosimo Urgesi, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Udine, and his colleagues turned to people with brain tumours to assess the feeling before and after surgery. Three to seven days after the removal of tumours from the posterior part of the brain, in the parietal cortex, patients reported feeling a greater sense of self-transcendence....

After binge-watching the 18-hour PBS documentary series The Vietnam War, by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, I was left emotionally emptied and ethically exhausted from seeing politicians in the throes of deception, self-deception and the sunk-cost bias that resulted in a body count totaling more than three million dead North and South Vietnamese civilians and soldiers, along with more than 58,000 American troops. With historical perspective, it is now evident to all but delusional ideologues that the war was an utter waste of human lives, economic resources, political capital and moral reserves....

“Whoosh!” exclaims my friend Frank, as he thrusts his cupped hands upward, nearly knocking over his drink on the table between us. We are sitting in my backyard in Leiden, the Netherlands. Frank is demonstrating how, once or twice each day, a peregrine falcon swoops upward past his hospital office window with a freshly killed pigeon in its talons, headed for its lair underneath the giant illuminated logo at the top of the building....

In 1872, with the publication of “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” Charles Darwin went rogue. Only a decade after the anatomist Duchenne de Boulogne’s produced the first neurology text illustrated by photographs, Darwin claimed to be the first to use photographs in a scientific publication to actually document the expressive spectrum of the face. Combining speculation about raised eyebrows and flushed skin with vile commentary about mental illness, he famously logged diagrams of facial musculature, along with drawings of sulky chimpanzees and photographs of weeping infants, to create a study that spanned species, temperament, age, and gender....

Global leaders are meeting in New York this week to sign the Paris climate agreement. One of the expressed purposes of the document is to limit warming to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C.” A Climate Central analysis shows that the world will have to dramatically accelerate emissions reductions if it wants to meet that goal. The average global temperature change for the first three months of 2016 was 1....

Many people I know (including members of my family) feel exercise is a time-consuming, unpleasant chore, and they dread it. The need to change into other clothes, to frequently take a block of time out of busy lives, and to get dirty and fatigued: they find it all unappealing. But I’ve always enjoyed the hard work and even the satisfaction of earning the next day’s sore muscles. And I indulged myself with a slight sense of pride in knowing not only that I was helping the biological machinery that promotes health but also that I got a nice side benefit of being able to eat cookies because I’d burned extra calories....