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Climate change is affecting every continent across the globe. Climate research, on the other hand, is in need of catching up. There are far more studies on climate impacts in high-income countries than in low-income countries, according to a new study that reviewed more than 100,000 published climate research papers. It’s a problem the authors refer to as an “attribution gap” — an imbalance in the scientific evidence for the influence of global warming in different regions....

Congress has a long-standing aversion to climate policy. Cap and trade saw a spectacular death in 2010. A plan to pay utilities for selling more clean electricity was axed this month. And proposals to tax carbon dioxide emissions never had a chance. But there is one major exception to lawmakers’ reluctance to tackle greenhouse gases: clean energy subsidies. Congress passed the first production tax credit for wind in 1992. The PTC has been extended 13 times since then....

During World War II, cryptographers cracked Germany’s Enigma code by exploiting known language patterns in the encrypted messages. Using the expected frequencies and distributions of certain letters and words helped British computer scientist Alan Turing and his colleagues find the key to translate gibberish into plain language. Now researchers are borrowing from the world of cryptography to convert brain signals into limb movements. Many human motions, such as walking or reaching, follow predictable patterns....

Temporal lobe epilepsy—a common form of epilepsy characterized by seizures that begin in the memory-regulating temporal lobe—does appear to influence personality, though not in the way many may think and certainly not in the way people have believed throughout history. The idea of the epileptic personality is an ancient one. Thousands of years ago people with epilepsy were thought to be possessed by either divine beings or demons. In fact, the notion that a seizure represents a kind of communion with another spiritual realm still holds sway in some socie- ties today....

In the search for extraterrestrial life, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, the largest in the solar system, is no Europa. The salty subsurface ocean it likely harbors is much farther below its surface than is Europa’s probable liquid ocean, and it’s sandwiched between layers of ice, leading most scientists to conclude that the prospects for life on—or inside—Ganymede are dim. Little else has been known about this gigantic moon, despite the fact that it could be key to understanding the history of the Jovian system, thereby unlocking the geologic and biological secrets of its icy Galilean satellites....

When learning a foreign language, most people fall back on traditional methods: reading, writing, listening and repeating. But if you also gesture with your arms while studying, you can remember the vocabulary better, even months later. Linking a word to brain areas responsible for movement strengthens the memory of its meaning. This is the conclusion a research team reached after using magnetic pulses to deliberately disrupt these areas in language learners....

Listener Anna from Toronto wrote in and asked how she could determine whether the person she’s dating is the right match for her. For millennia, we’ve partnered within our tribe, our village, or our neighborhood. If we were lucky, the number of eligible partners we had to choose from reached maybe a dozen. Fast forward to today, however, and we can connect with untold numbers of people with the right-swipe of a finger....

It’s official: The world’s next leading particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider straddling the Franco-Swiss border, will not switch on until May 2008, according to a statement Friday from CERN, the European particle physics laboratory. Researchers had planned to perform a test run at the end of the year to work out any kinks in the $10 billion machine—a circular tunnel 27 kilometers (17 miles) in circumference that will operate at temperatures colder than outer space....

Anyone with access to a welder and the Internet soon could make his or her own replacement parts or tools with a new 3D metal printer that can be built in any garage. Until recently, most of the 3D printing hype has swirled around plastic 3D printers, which have been used to make everything from clothing to art. And while 3D metal printers do exist, their price tag starts at a half million dollars....

PTEROSAUR HEAD “Monsters of the Mesozoic Skies,” Michael B. Habib’s article on pterosaurs, gives the best discussion of their likely flight mechanisms I have ever read! Some birds with large heads and bills, such as pelicans, fly with their neck retracted over their back so that the weight of the head and bill are close to the shoulders (and thus the center of lift). Would such a posture be a way for pterosaurs to maintain better balance during flight?...

Think of machine learning in relation to Pandora. When Tim Westergren started the personalized Internet radio service, he employed hundreds of people to listen to music and identify its “features.” According to Westergren, the Music Genome Project was an effort to understand music at its most fundamental level by using several hundred attributes that could describe songs. The group decided to classify music into a number of “genomes”: Pop/Rock, Hip-Hop/Electronica, Jazz, World Music, and Classical....

Halos, auras, flashes of light, pins and needles running down your arms, the sudden scent of sulfur—many symptoms of a migraine have vaguely mystical qualities, and experts remain puzzled by the debilitating headaches’ cause. Researchers at Harvard University, however, have come at least one step closer to figuring out why women are twice as likely to suffer from chronic migraines as men. The brain of a female migraineur looks so unlike the brain of a male migraineur, asserts Harvard scientist Nasim Maleki, that we should think of migraines in men and women as “different diseases altogether....

By now it’s almost common knowledge that spending time in nature is good for you. Areas with more trees tend to be less polluted, so spending time there allows you to breathe easier. Spending time outdoors has been linked with reduced blood pressure and stress, and seems to motivate people to exercise more. “So it’ll come as no surprise that there’s research showing that spending time in nature is good,” says University of Exeter Medical School researcher Mathew P....

Starting around 50 years ago, astronomy began a winning streak of amazing discoveries. We found the cosmic microwave radiation left over from the big bang back in the 1960s, for instance, and in recent years we have identified thousands of planets orbiting distant stars. But the good times may be about to stop rolling. There is reason to fear that astronomy is ending its long run of lifting the veil on cosmic wonders....

When Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan stepped off the Moon in December 1972, it marked the end of US researchers’ access to the lunar surface. Since then, no US mission has touched down there to collect scientific data. That could soon change. In December, President Donald Trump ordered NASA to send astronauts back to the Moon. On 12 February, he proposed a 2019 budget that would allow the agency to begin planning a US$200-million lunar exploration programme....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineDelegates meeting this month in Durban, South Africa, to assess international progress on tackling climate change need to look beyond smoke stacks and car exhausts to a neglected source of emissions–agriculture.That’s the message from an international group of leading agricultural and climate scientists in a report published on November 16. They say that agriculture is the “single largest contributor to greenhouse-gas pollution on the planet”, through routes such as deforestation, rice growing and animal husbandry (see ‘Farming footprint’)....

Clue against Flu A goal in fighting influenza is a universal vaccine, one that works on many strains of the pathogen [see “Beating the Flu in a Single Shot”; Scientific American, June 2008]. But the virus’s outer coat, consisting mainly of proteins called hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, frequently mutate, forcing the reformulation of vaccines every season. Two studies report the discovery of human antibodies that target an area on hemagglutinin that does not change much....

Gazing up into the sky on a clear night, the heavens can appear as pristine as a mountain stream. But in truth, at least in Earth’s vicinity, the trash factor in space may be more akin to what is found in New York City’s East River. The region known as low Earth orbit (extending from 160 to 2,000 kilometers above Earth’s surface), which is where many satellites spend their lives and “afterlives,” has a litter problem caused by decades of neglect, and it’s one that currently lacks an expedient solution....

HOUSTON—EPA unveiled its plans yesterday for regulating the power sector, with greenhouse gas rules in a supporting role to limits on conventional pollution. Describing his agency’s regulatory blueprint at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference here, EPA Administrator Michael Regan argued that regulations that would be rolled out in the coming year for mercury, ozone, water and coal ash would help finish the job on curbing climate pollutants that market conditions started by shifting U....

It’s hard to escape the din of the nation’s prognostication industry coming to terms with its wrongness today, with so many teeth to gnash and garments to rend. But here in the world of science and medicine, the election of Donald Trump has left many trying to make sense of the vagaries, reversals, and red herrings that have marked his rhetoric on key issues from research funding to drug pricing. Here are five questions we have about what the Trump administration will mean for science....