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A study of the trend of development in aeroplane construction renders it possible to predict with some degree of certainty the leading characteristics of the aeroplane of the future, and especially of that type which will be built purely for racing purposes. The following is an attempted study along these lines. The writer has no wish to assume the role of prophet, and the accompanying drawings and description are based mainly upon a survey of the work which has been done during the present year of phenomenal development by the designer, the constructor, and the airman....

COMPUTERS CAN CALCULATE at staggering speed, but they cannot match the human visual system’s uncanny ability to assemble a coherent picture from ambiguous fragments in an image. The brain seems to home in effortlessly on the correct interpretation by using built-in knowledge of the statistics of the world to eliminate improbable solutions. This problem-solving aspect of perception is strikingly illustrated in (a) by the famous illusory rectangle of the late Italian psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa and Richard L....

Klaus Jacob, a senior research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, explains. The rapid displacement of a significant volume of ocean water by some external physical process acting either from below at the ocean floor or from above impacting the water surface generates a tsunami. Gravity then provides the restoring force to smooth out the vertical displacement of the ocean surface, causing a wave to propagate away from the source of disturbance....

1972 “To what extent is staring an aggressive stimulus in human interactions? A group of psychologists at Stanford University had confederates stand at street corners and stare at people who were waiting for the traffic light to change to green. People who realized they were being stared at crossed the intersection faster than people who were not being stared at. The discovery opens up some interesting lines of research. Is a stare always perceived as a threat, even in the absence of other aggressive cues?...

Editor’s note: This is the first in an occasional series looking at how climate change affects the rich and famous. We realize, of course, that billions of people are getting hit - hard - by climate impacts. Many of these are those least able to afford it. The wealthy are not immune either. It’s time to see how climate hits Rodeo Drive. Or St. Moritz. Or Champagne. Reporting was done in collaboration with Public Radio International’s The World....

Joe Biden will spend his first hours as president trying to obliterate much of the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda, restore public land protections and reestablish the United States as a global leader on climate change policy. Biden will sit in the Oval Office later today and sign a sweeping executive order to rejoin the Paris Agreement and undo President Trump’s rollback of greenhouse gas policies, said Gina McCarthy, Biden’s national climate adviser....

Have you ever seen the Milky Way? Maybe, but have you ever seen it while standing in the Great White Way—or any Great White Way: Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, or Akihabara? A citizen science research project known as the GLOBE at Night suggests that much of urban humanity—which now constitutes more than half the 7 billion people on the planet—cannot observe the opalescent band of stars, our galactic home, in the vast void of the universe....

Faith isn’t faith if it’s based on evidence, so it’s wrong to say that I have faith in human progress. Unlike God, progress is objectively real, a demonstrable fact, as much so as evolution. Humanity has gotten wealthier, healthier, freer, more peaceful and smarter. We know more than our ancestors did, and we’re learning more all the time. These trends, any reasonable person must acknowledge, constitute progress. The question is, how long can this progress last?...

Less than three weeks after the massive explosion of a hazardous chemicals warehouse in Tianjin, China, another blast killed five people at a chemical plant in China’s coastal province of Shandong. The accident occurred as Chinese authorities were considering new industrial safety measures. At a cabinet meeting in Beijing to draft a new water pollution prevention law, China’s minister of industry and information technology, Miao Wei, said that since the Tianjin explosion local governments throughout the country have provided his ministry with plans to relocate about 1,000 chemical plants away from population centers....

Two more climate hawks soon could be at the helm of key financial agencies. There’s a growing expectation that President Biden will tap another two climate-conscious officials to lead independent financial agencies that could help blunt the impact of global warming on the U.S. financial system. Rostin Behnam, acting chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, likely will be nominated to permanently lead the CFTC, which regulates the nation’s derivatives markets, according to news reports....

The company building an oil pipeline that has been subject to sustained public protests said on Thursday it has resumed drilling beneath a North Dakota lake despite a last-ditch legal challenge from a Native American tribe leading the opposition. Energy Transfer Partners LP (ETP.N) is building the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) to move crude from the Northern Plains to the Gulf of Mexico. The project was put on hold under the administration of former Democratic President Barack Obama, but new President Donald Trump, a Republican, helped put it back on track....

As the coronavirus pandemic rages on, many winter sports enthusiasts are skipping their usual ski resort visits in order to avoid contagious crowds or preemptive shutdowns. But that does not mean they are giving up on skiing, snowboarding and snowmobiling. Many are instead venturing into unpatrolled and ungroomed backcountry terrain. Specialized backcountry equipment retailers and manufacturers are, in fact, reporting record sales. And some skiers are skipping backcountry safety lessons before heading off-piste, with potentially deadly results: the week before Christmas, at least three Colorado backcountry skiers died in avalanches, and a fourth perished on December 26....

The sun—that power plant in the sky—bathes Earth in ample energy to fulfill all the world’s power needs many times over. It doesn’t give off carbon dioxide emissions. It won’t run out. And it’s free. So how on Earth can people turn this bounty of sunbeams into useful electricity? The sun’s light (and all light) contains energy. Usually, when light hits an object the energy turns into heat, like the warmth you feel while sitting in the sun....

In principle, science should set itself apart from the hue and cry of partisan bickering. After all, the scientific enterprise reaches its conclusions by testing hypotheses about the workings of the natural world. Consider the porpoise. Based on its appearance and aquatic home, the animal was assumed to be a fish. But evidence gleaned from observing its bone structure, its lack of gills and the genes it holds in common with other warm-blooded land animals leads to its being classified as a mammal with a very high level of confidence....

Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, studies the eating of insects, or entomophagy, and is the author of ‘Edible insects: future prospects for food and feed security’, published in 2013 by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Now he is organizing the first international conference to address the question of whether insects can feed the world. Ahead of the conference opening on May 14 in Wageningen, van Huis talked to Nature about researching, and dining on, this neglected food source....

Foresters need to take a proactive approach to keeping their forests climate-ready, says the author of two studies on assisted migration in the forests of the Canadian province of Alberta. Assisted migration, the conscious movement of one species of life – plant or animal – to another region, has been used for several years as a survival technique against climate change. In forests, this means planting heartier trees in regions vulnerable to high heat, drought and pests....

Given the benefits of balance bikes, why did it take so long for them to replace training wheels? There are plenty of other examples in which overlooked solutions that involve subtraction turn out to be better alternatives. In some European cities, for example, urban planners have gotten rid of traffic lights and road signs to make streets safer—an idea that runs counter to conventional traffic design. Leidy Klotz, an engineer at the University of Virginia, noticed that minimalist designs, in which elements are removed from an existing model, were uncommon....

It seems the general public just can’t make up its mind about the existence of man-made climate change. Rather than steadily increasing or decreasing over the last decade, the U.S. public’s concern over our warming planet has jumped up and down, according to Gallup polls. But what exactly is driving this seesawing of opinions on climate change? The level of public concern about this global issue is mostly influenced by the mobilization efforts of political leaders and advocacy groups, new research shows....

In just over a week the world will find out who has won the 109th chemistry Nobel prize. As excitement builds once more, analysts and online commentators are making their predictions on who they think has a chance of securing science’s top gong, with suggestions ranging from Crispr to heterogeneous catalysis and perennial also-ran the lithium–ion battery. Clarivate Analytics, which maintains the publication indexing platform Web of Science, has released their citation laureates, hailing discoveries in the area of C–H functionalisation, heterogeneous catalysis and perovskites as Nobel-worthy....

Forgetfulness is accepted as a natural part of getting older, but it might not have to be. Scientists say they have identified an important biological mechanism in the brain that underlies the sorts of memory lapses that come with age. The condition is familiar to just about anyone who has lived more than a few decades and is often marked by frustrated utterances like “Where did I park the car?” and “What am I doing here?...