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Can you change your habits? Let’s find out! This week, I talked with Gretchen Rubin, best-selling author of Happier and Better than Before, and co-host of the wildly popular Happier podcast. Gretchen’s new book Outer Order/Inner Calm talks about how to declutter and organize your life to make more room for happiness. Our discussion focuses mostly on the work Gretchen has done on habit change. Gretchen outlines four basic tendencies or personality types that determine how we respond to inner and outer expectations....

How to Care for COVID at Home, and Is That Sniffle Allergies or the Virus? COVID Quickly, Episode 30 How to care for yourself when you’re sick at home with COVID, and how do you know when it’s just spring allergies making you sneeze, and not the virus? Airdate: May 16, 2022 Safer Indoor Air, and People Want Masks on Planes and Trains: COVID Quickly, Episode 29 Today, we’re going to talk about reducing infections by improving indoor air quality....

A version of this story was co-published with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. In the last 150 years, prospectors and energy companies have drilled as many as 12 million holes across the United States in search of oil and gas. Many of those holes were plugged after they dried up. But hundreds of thousands were simply abandoned and forgotten, often leaving no records of their existence. Government reports have warned for decades that abandoned wells can provide pathways for oil, gas or brine-laden water to contaminate groundwater supplies or to travel up to the surface....

U.S. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has swiftly complied with a request from GOP leaders in oil-and-gas-producing states to scrap an Obama-era request for industry information about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The agency yesterday withdrew a formal survey of oil and gas companies that required them to provide information about onshore equipment and controls that could reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, including methane. Industry and state officials complained that the information collection request (ICR) was time-consuming and expensive....

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - Members of the European Parliament voted through the world’s toughest carbon dioxide standards for new cars on Tuesday, prompting a cautious welcome from environmental campaigners. The new rules set a limit of 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer (g/km) as an average across all new cars sold in the EU, compared with an existing limit of 130 g/km. The European Commission, the EU executive, proposed the target should apply from 2020, but full implementation has been delayed for a year following months of negotiation....

Hormones can surge and drop within minutes to direct many of our daily functions: sleep, digestion, reactions to stress. General hormone levels rise and fall slightly across the year as well. New work shows that the pattern has a seasonal memory of sorts, too, governed by a newly discovered internal clock. By studying millions of blood tests, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, found that hormone-producing glands grow and shrink in continuous, self-regulating annual cycles....

How does geothermal drilling trigger earthquakes? Seismologist David Oppenheimer of the U.S. Geological Survey Earthquakes Hazards Team explains (as told to Katherine Harmon): Traditional geothermal drilling bores into hot rock such as sandstone that has water or steam trapped in its pore spaces and natural fractures. When a drilled hole intersects these fractures, the water flashes into steam because of the sudden drop in pressure—like bubbles that come out of a soda bottle when the cap is removed....

The Chinese rocket has come down. The 23-ton core stage of a Long March 5B booster crashed back to Earth Saturday night (May 8), ending 10 controversial days aloft that captured the attention of the world and started a wider conversation about orbital debris and responsible spacefaring. The Long March 5B reentered the atmosphere over the Arabian Peninsula at about 10:15 p.m. EDT Saturday (0215 GMT on Sunday, May 9), according to U....

The car journey along the gravitational-wave detector’s right arm lasts a good 10 minutes, an eternity compared with the 10 microseconds it takes for the laser light needed to detect these ripples in space-time to make the same trip. This tunnel isn’t in Hanford, Washington, or Livingston, Louisiana, the locations of the twin labs that form the Laser Interfero­meter Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), which made history a year ago when its team announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves....

Note the following first. If there are k people in a $5,000 interval, then we don’t need any more questions, because we don’t care about their order. If there are k people in a $10,000 interval, then we need only one more question. If there are k people in a $20,000 interval, then the number of additional questions depends on k. If k = 2, then we need only two more questions if both are in the same $10,000 range and only one more question otherwise; if k = 3, then we again need only two more questions in the worst case; for k >= 4 we need at most three more questions asking about the first and second $10,000 intervals and then about subintervals of size $5,000....

By of Richard A. Lovett of Nature magazineJust over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found.The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere....

Most people know natural gas as home-heating fuel, but methane may soon be powering spaceships into orbit and beyond. Rocket researchers worldwide are now working on engines that burn methane rather than conventional liquid propellants. During the past half a century, engineers have generally opted to use hydrocarbons, such as kerosene, or hydrogen itself, along with oxygen liquefied at low temperature, as chemical propellants. But kerosene and hydrogen have drawbacks, according to David Riseborough of C&Space in Seongnam, South Korea....

Geopolitical issues are driving up the cost of oil and eroding U.S. energy security and could trigger another recession, according to energy experts. But fuels derived from natural gas could help avoid a future oil crisis if they’re poised to effectively compete in the oil-dominated transportation sector, members of the U.S. Energy Security Council said yesterday at a meeting of energy industry leaders. “The U.S. is really facing an energy security paradox....

Controlling carbon in the atmosphere will require a mix of energy technologies—potentially including nuclear reactors, which emit no carbon but are seen as risky because of a few major accidents. That risk could be greatly reduced. Commercial reactors have used the same fuel for decades: small pellets of uranium dioxide stacked inside long cylindrical rods made of a zirconium alloy. Zirconium allows the neutrons generated from fission in the pellets to readily pass among the many rods submerged in water inside a reactor core, supporting a self-sustaining, heat-producing nuclear reaction....

The long-anticipated CDC guidance on schools was released on February 12. This is the latest event in what has been, up to this point, among the most politically charged and scientifically contested aspects of the COVID-19 response. In its guidance, the agency calls for K–12 schools in particular to reopen as soon as possible, noting that with safety precautions in place such as physical distancing, contact tracing and mask-wearing, many have been able to open safely, and stay open....

A panel of scientists recommended today that the spraying of DDT in malaria-plagued Africa and Asia should be greatly reduced because people are exposed in their homes to high levels that may cause serious health effects. The scientists from the United States and South Africa said the insecticide, banned decades ago in most of the world, should only be used as a last resort in combating malaria. The stance of the panel, led by a University of California epidemiologist, is likely to be controversial with public health officials....

Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing are President Obama’s diplomatic climate change negotiators, charged with representing America’s interests in the tumultuous U.N. global warming negotiations. They are described by environmentalists, fellow negotiators and former colleagues as smart, pragmatic and occasionally didactic. Nearly all used similar language to describe the tough political and diplomatic obstacle course Stern and Pershing have had to navigate over the past four years. They were: “constrained” by Congress....

Only 28 percent of American CEOs are women. To find out why such a gap exists, a study published in 2018 in Personnel Psychology analyzed more than 100 papers on leadership emergence published between 1957 and 2017. In the papers, samples of students or co-workers were asked to select group leaders or to rate one another on the extent to which they led a group. Some of the papers also measured group participation and personality traits such as assertiveness....

The Arctic can appear to be a pristine, isolated frozen land. But human pollution has reached even this remote corner of the world—which the World Wildlife Fund has called “the chemical sink of the globe.” Now researchers have discovered that a virtually indestructible type of chemical has been building up in the region since the 1990s. The presence of these “forever chemicals” is undoubtedly growing worldwide, scientists say. And the potential impacts on the health of humans and ecosystems are not yet fully known....

After being isolated from the rest of the world for nearly a year and a half, sealed away in a mock spacecraft, six volunteer astronauts “returned” to Earth today (Nov. 4) to end a simulated mission to Mars and back. The hatch of the pretend Mars500 spaceship, which is actually a special isolation facility at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow, was opened at 6 a.m. EDT (1000 GMT) this morning to mark the successful completion of a 520-day simulated journey to the Red Planet....