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Millions of shorebirds descend on the Arctic each year to mate and raise chicks during the tundra’s brief burst of summer. But that burst, which usually begins in mid-June, never arrived this year for eastern Greenland’s shorebirds, a set of ground-nesting species. Instead, a record late snowpack—lingering into July—sealed the birds off from food and nesting sites. Without these key resources avian migrants to the region will not reproduce in 2018, experts say....

Joy Zedler carefully planned the three experimental wetlands at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Arboretum to be identical: parallel marshes 295 feet long and 15 feet wide, carved by engineers into the green landscape. Zedler’s contractors planted all three tracts with similar species to see how the vegetation would absorb and clean water runoff during storms. Zedler’s team also allowed the same amount of water to flow into the test beds from a pond at the front ends of the tracts....

A long stretch of salt marsh that hugs the East Coast from North Carolina to Florida is being targeted for conservation under a unique agreement reached by state and federal officials, including several Pentagon leaders concerned about climate change. The goal in trying to protect more than 1 million acres of salt marsh is to maintain coastal resilience to climate change and protect inland property, including several major military bases that are jeopardized by rising sea levels and intensifying coastal storms....

By Richard A. LovettChemicals used to reduce oil slicks during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico may have rendered the oil more toxic than official reports suggest, according to a Canadian toxicologist.Peter Hodson, an aquatic toxicologist from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, presented his case on 9 November at a meeting of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in Portland, Oregon, in a session that highlighted the uncertain effects of such treatments on marine wildlife....

Want to know what the inside of an ice sheet looks like? A new 3D map and animation of the Greenland ice sheet lets researchers peer into the layers of ice laid down over millennia and see how they have been warped as they flow over time and are put under pressure as newer layers accumulate above. This will help them better understand how Greenland—which holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by 20 feet—will respond to current climate change by showing how it responded to similar changes in the past....

Spring break season is here, and, like a lot of beachgoers, science too is suffering some stings — albeit not of the jellyfish kind. In the latest ploy, reported Wednesday, a group of researchers at the University of Wroclaw, in Poland, tried to seat a fictional scholar onto the editorial boards of 360 academic publications. The goal: to test whether, with just a CV — full of fake scientific degrees — and a profile on Academia....

Spring is in full swing now, and a number of the straphangers (read: subway riders) in New York City, as well as citizens in other locales, are getting new tubes and tires and dragging their bikes out of storage. Bicycle riding is the skill you reportedly never forget, but there’s a raging debate about whether or not you should forget your helmet when you hop on your two-wheeler. Last September a plucky psychologist at the University of Bath in England announced the results of a study in which he played both researcher and guinea pig....

A heat wave is an extended period of intense heat, often caused by hot air trapped in place by high pressure systems. Last week saw record breaking temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere and cities like Chicago, Paris, and New Delhi have seen historic heat waves in the last decade. Climate change will bring with it not just hotter summers but also more intense and more frequent heat waves. What is at risk in this increased heat?...

Ink, watercolors and pencils may not seem like critical tools for neuroscientists. Yet these were the implements that helped Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, discover that neurons are the main functional unit of the brain. His intricate drawings of brain cells served as a lens through which he could examine how their structure dictated their function. Ramón y Cajal’s late 19th- and early 20th-century sketches were nothing like the bland illustrations that fill most modern textbooks....

In college, I learned about the myriad logical fallacies that pervade our world. Good logic, it turned out, was pretty restrictive. It consisted primarily of modus ponens—“If A is true, then B is true. A is true. Therefore, B is true”—and modus tollens—“If A is true, then B is true. B is not true. Therefore, A is not true.” In contrast, there is a universe of logical fallacies. In science, the most vexing typically takes the following form: My theory says: if P, then Q....

Tobacco has become a much-maligned plant in modern society. Cigarettes, which typically contain dried leaves from a tall, hybrid species called Nicotiana tabacum, are blamed for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States. And reams of scientific findings indicate that cigarette smoking—inhaling a toxic brew that can contain at least 70 cancer-causing chemicals—harms nearly every organ of the body. But tobacco itself is not the problem, according to Gina Boudreau....

ILLUSIONS are anomalies that can reveal clues about the mysterious workings of the brain to neuroscientists in much the same way as the fictional Sherlock Holmes can solve a crime puzzle by homing in on a single out-of-the-ordinary fact. Think of the phrase “the dog that did not bark” (in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “Silver Blaze”) or of the missing dumbbell (in Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear). Perhaps the most famous examples of such visual tricks are the geometric optical illusions....

When Will Wright was developing Spore, his much acclaimed computer game, he interviewed several life scientists. He asked them how nature had actually done what he was attempting to simulate in the game—which was, among other things, the development of the earliest stages of life and its evolution. (Some billboard advertisements for the game feature the slogan “Evolution Begins at Spore.com.”) Among the scientists Wright consulted were Michael Levine, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley; Neil H....

Some say the age of exploration is over, but there are still parts of the world that scientists and other explorers have rarely penetrated. Many of these places lie beneath the sea’s surface, and one such place–the so-called Bird’s Head Seascape off the western coast of the island of New Guinea–revealed upon recent survey that it contained as many as 52 new species of fish, shrimp and coral. “The scientists that went there did expect to see impressive things,” says Sebastian Troeng of Conservation International in Washington, D....

Using sensors tucked inside the ears of live gerbils, researchers from Columbia University are providing critical insights into how the ear processes sound. In particular, the researchers have uncovered new evidence on how the cochlea, a coiled portion of the inner ear, processes and amplifies sound. The findings could lay the initial building blocks for better hearing aids and implants. The research could also help settle a long-simmering debate: Do the inner workings of the ear function somewhat passively with sound waves traveling into the cochlea, bouncing along sensory tissue, and slowing as they encounter resistance until they are boosted and processed into sound?...

We humans customarily assume that our visual system sits atop a pinnacle of evolutionary success. It enables us to appreciate space in three dimensions, to detect objects from a distance and to move about safely. We are exquisitely able to recognize other individuals and to read their emotions from mere glimpses of their faces. In fact, we are such visual animals that we have difficulty imagining the sensory worlds of creatures whose capacities extend to other realms–a night-hunting bat, for example, that finds small insects by listening to the echoes of its own high-pitched call....

Today’s genetic technologies are not yet a crystal ball for seeing a child’s future, but doctors are closer than ever to routinely glimpsing the full genetic blueprints of a fetus just months after sperm meets egg. That genomic reconstruction would reveal future disease risk and genetic traits even as early as the first trimester of pregnancy. Fetal screening could theoretically detect every hint of disease-associated mutations or disease-carrier status in a fetus’s genome—sometimes outpacing geneticists’ knowledge of how to interpret such information....

Sales of television show DVDs have exploded over the past few years. But why do viewers shell out so much cash for what are essentially reruns? A study in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that “reconsumption,” as the researchers call it, is more complex than one might think. People use familiar entertainment to measure how their lives have changed in positive ways. Cristel Antonia Russell, a marketing professor at American University, and Sidney J....

Arctic sea ice hit an all-time low for July against a backdrop of record-breaking temperatures and raging wildfires at the northern reaches of Earth. Then a cyclone began swirling over the thinning ice this week. Taken together, those conditions have made scientists concerned about what the rest of the season may hold as thousands of miles of sea ice melts away every day. Ice cover in the Arctic Ocean hit an all-time low for this time of year on July 15, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center....

In the pitched debate over genetically modified (GM) foods and crops, it can be hard to see where scientific evidence ends and dogma and speculation begin. In the nearly 20 years since they were first commercialized, GM crop technologies have seen dramatic uptake. Advocates say that they have increased agricultural production by more than US$98 billion and saved an estimated 473 million kilograms of pesticides from being sprayed. But critics question their environmental, social and economic impacts....