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Unseen dangers accompanied deadly flames in the record-breaking wildfire season that raged across the U.S. West in 2020. In addition to the millions of acres burned by the blazes, the thousands of structures they destroyed and the dozens of people they killed, the 2020 fires brought some of the worst air quality conditions ever observed across the region. A dangerous combination of both fine particulate matter and toxic surface-level ozone—both forms of air pollution that can be produced or worsened by wildfires—built up in the air and spread across the Western states....

Against all political intuition, Republican candidates could win votes by taking “green” positions on the controversy over climate change, according to new poll results released Tuesday. Voters tend to favor political candidates who believe that humans have contributed to global warming and that the nation should take action by switching from fossil fuels to solar and wind power, according to Stanford University’s national survey. The team of researchers at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment found that by taking a “green position” on climate, candidates of either party can gain the votes of some citizens while not alienating others....

1970 Gene Switches “How are genes controlled? All cells must be able to turn their genes on and off. For example, a bacterial cell may need different enzymes in order to digest a new food offered by a new environment. As a simple virus goes through its life cycle, its genes function sequentially, directing a series of timed events. As more complex organisms develop from the egg, their cells switch thousands of different genes on and off, and the switching continues throughout the organism’s life cycle....

Even as U.S. policy makers and business leaders seek to put the COVID pandemic in the rearview mirror with the help of highly effective vaccines, a fundamental policy and planning gap is looming. Many who survive the initial viral illness suffer debilitating long-term sequelae. Unlike the common cold or even influenza, this virus causes a bewildering array of symptoms that persist long after the acute illness is resolved and can render some affected unable to resume their usual activities....

Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called The Dawn of Solar Power (click the link to see a table of contents). Published in August 2013, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. We have come a long way in taming the sun’s chaotic energy since 19th century efforts to create a solar motor. Today we can efficiently heat water and buildings and even generate substantial transmittable power all from this abundant light source....

As children, we inhabit a land of imagination. Our bedroom is a forest, a snowbank is a fortress, and we are elves, warriors, princesses and superheroes. Most of us put away fantasy in adulthood but with an important exception (and I don’t mean Comic-Con). As Felipe De Brigard of Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience explains in our cover story, “Why We Imagine,” we routinely unleash our imagination in reveries of how things might have gone differently....

Have astronomers just found the first-ever exomoon, a lunar companion of a planet orbiting another star? Definitely maybe. Using data from NASA’s Kepler and Hubble space telescopes, Columbia University astronomers Alex Teachey and David Kipping report the potential signal of a Neptune-size moon around a planet three times heavier than Jupiter, all orbiting a nearly 10-billion-year-old sun-like star called Kepler 1625 b about 8,000 light-years from Earth. Such a large moon defies easy explanation based on prevailing theories....

A piece by Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic (2/9/21) takes a pessimistic view of herd immunity ever being achieved in the U.S. The piece starts with an analogy for the concept, likening it to wet logs in a campfire. “If there’s enough immunity in a population — ‘you can’t get the fire to start, period’,” Zhang writes, with the quote coming from an Emory University biologist. Zhang’s piece states that it becomes “downright impossible” to achieve herd immunity if vaccines only prevent serious COVID-19 rather than also preventing infection with SARS-CoV-2....

An oil flood through an Arkansas subdivision on March 29 is just the most recent example of pipeline problems in the U.S. In recent weeks, months and years diesel has leaked from a pipeline into wetlands near Salt Lake City; oil has spilled into the Yellowstone River in Montana; and about 20,000 barrels of oil have spewed into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. The question: Is the problem the pipelines themselves or what they carry?...

In April, the first image of a black hole landed on front pages and in news feeds around the world. Researchers used millions of gigabytes of data from eight separate observatories to reconstruct the black hole’s event horizon. Scientists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) are using troves of data to create similarly unprecedented images from inside our bodies. In a paper published in the May 2019 issue of Medical Image Analysis, MSK investigators, led by medical physics researcher Ida Häggström, detail a new method of image reconstruction for positron emission tomography, or PET ....

One quiet afternoon in the fall of 2014, just as the trees were changing from green to gold, Tabetha Boyajian visited our astronomy department at Pennsylvania State University to share an unusual discovery. That landscape on the brink of transformation turned out to be a fitting backdrop for a meeting that would change the course of our careers. Then a postdoctoral scholar at Yale University, Boyajian had flagged inexplicable fluctuations of light from a star monitored by NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope....

For most people, identity is inextricably tied to work. We strive for meaning within our jobs and take criticism of our labors personally. Not so for senior investment bankers. They dissociate their sense of self so severely from their work that researchers have coined a new term for the phenomenon: teflonic identity maneuvering. The inspiration for the nomenclature followed a series of in-depth interviews conducted over nearly two years with six senior investment bankers in London....

Deep in Texas hill country, about 120 miles southwest of Austin, Joseph Kopser is working voters in a tiny town that calls itself the “Cowboy Capital of the World.” Bandera was a post–Civil War starting point for cattle drives, and one of Kopser’s stops as he runs to be the U.S. congressman from Texas’s 21st District. On this mid-February morning he seems to be hitting all the right notes. He’s an Iraq war veteran....

To sense their environment, cells rely on the receptor proteins that stud their surface. These receptors latch onto specific molecules, triggering a cascade of biochemical events that lead to cell behaviors, such as the secretion of hormones or the destruction of pathogens. But before receptors can switch on, they often have to bump into one another. Donald Ingber of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues demonstrated that they could control this activation using particles of iron oxide attached to dinitrophenyl (DNP) molecules, which attach to the receptors on histamine-producing mast cells....

More than 60 oil and gas companies committed to a new framework today to report methane emissions as the United Nations reported that atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas reached a record high. The plan from the Climate & Clean Air Coalition’s Oil and Gas Methane Partnership (OGMP) tasks companies with reporting methane emissions from both their core operations as well as joint ventures. As a part of the voluntary framework, companies will share their own methane reduction targets with OGMP, an initiative managed by the U....

Deforestation has declined to record lows in recent years, and just over 50% of Brazil’s rainforest now falls under some form of protected status. But the effects of habitat loss take time to manifest. “Cutting down trees doesn’t kill a bird directly. It takes a lot of time for those birds to actually die. They’re all crammed into the habitat that’s left. Then gradually you’ll have this increased mortality,” says Robert Ewers, an ecologist at Imperial College London and the study’s leader....

An electronic database going public today has gathered the latest science on some of the most controversial chemicals in use, offering a handy look into potential health effects when babies are exposed while developing in the womb. The interactive Web site, called “Critical Windows of Development,” has compiled an array of data from hundreds of scientists studying low doses of endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Theo Colborn, a scientist often credited with discovering in the early 1990s that environmental pollutants were mimicking and altering hormones, led the effort to create the database....

Removing sulfur is a stinky proposition for oil refineries. The U.S. and Europe are tightening limits on the sulfur content of gasoline at the same time the crude oil coming out of the ground is becoming increasingly “sour,” or sulfurous. Desulfurization technology “has pretty much been wrung out,” says Thomas Wellborn, principal consultant of Denver-based Hydrocarbon Exploration and Development. “We need new, innovative technologies.” A few young companies with unconventional methods may soon answer that call....

CALCULATING CATASTROPHE “What Should Carbon Cost?” by Gilbert E. Metcalf, is unsuccessful in answering the question of how to calculate the most appropriate carbon tax rate. The uncertainties are too great. And probable impacts of climate change are beyond the scale of usual economic analyses. The use of integrated assessment models (IAMs) to calculate climate damage is like employing Newtonian physics to analyze phenomena far outside its range of applicability. Metcalf states that “the richer future generations are compared to us, the less we should feel compelled to incur costs now to make them better off....

Positive experiences happen to us everyday yet we don’t always take full advantage of them. Have you ever noticed that it could be a great day (you had 8 hours of sleep, it’s the weekend, had a great conversation with a friend etc…) but that it takes just one harsh word from someone or one piece of bad news to ruin the day. Research by Shelley Gable and Jonathan Haidt suggests that we actually have three times more positive experiences than negative....