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A powerful eye in the sky is helping scientists spy “super-emitters” of methane, a greenhouse gas about 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. That observer is NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument, or EMIT for short. EMIT has been mapping the chemical composition of dust throughout Earth’s desert regions since being installed on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS) in July, helping researchers understand how airborne dust affects climate....

Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania, made news a few months ago when he published the results of a study demonstrating that where people cast ballots affects how they vote. Although voters think they are making rational decisions based solely on the issues and facts, they are actually subtly influenced by a long list of other variables, most of which operate at an unconscious level. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Berger about what this new research can teach us about elections, expensive clothing and the human brain....

Wildfires are ravaging California, and heat waves are scorching Europe as extreme weather takes hold around the world this summer. Those blazes and hot spells might be worse because of high temperatures in the icy Arctic, new research shows. Scientists have long pointed to the clear fingerprint of human-caused warming on many of these events, suggesting that as global temperatures continue to rise, extreme heat, wildfires and other climate-related disasters will worsen....

I have learned that when someone you love has Alzheimer’s, he or she is not the only one facing memory issues. Do we remember the bright, sunny person full of life and creativity, or do we remember the person who no longer recognizes us, who lies in a bed in a nursing home, gasping for air? Do we remember the lover with whom we could share our body, our thoughts and our adventures or the person who cannot finish a sentence or find the bathroom?...

Roughly 450 million years ago a region that was likely the size of Europe started to stretch and tear. Deep gashes opened in Earth’s crust, spewing lava that leaped into the air in luminous walls that reached up to 500 meters. Although the ground eventually grew still, the damage had just begun. Once the lava hardened, rainwater dissolved carbon dioxide that the volcanoes had pumped into the atmosphere, washing it back into the ground....

Let’s first take a 10,000 foot view of what exactly the Hyperloop is. In 2013, Elon Musk first made his idea of the Hyperloop public. If you recognize that name, that’s because I’ve mentioned him in my podcast on the Tesla Powerwall. He’s the founder of many tech giants, such as Tesla, PayPal, SpaceX, and zip2. He’s a pretty extraordinary billionaire, which I’m sure we will see much more of in the years to come....

We take the moon for granted, but Earth would be a very different place had our nearest neighbor only achieved half of its present mass when it formed some 4.5 billion years ago in a titanic collision. In fact, we might not even be here to appreciate it at all. Let’s start with eclipses. In one of those bizarre cosmic coincidences, our moon today is positioned at just the right distance between Earth and the sun for its diameter to completely block out the sun during a total solar eclipse—the next of which will occur on Friday, August 1....

In the classic book series, Little House on the Prairie, Pa’s wanderlust repeatedly drives the Ingalls family westward past the edges of civilization. That craving for open space is probably what drove Homo sapiens to leave Africa in the first place and spread across the globe. According to new research, the desire to expand into new territory may have provided an evolutionary advantage to those who had it over those who lacked it....

Genetic variants that shape physical features that vary with sex, such as waist-to-hip ratio, may also affect autism risk, according to a new study. Many of the genes involved in these features are not linked to autism or even the brain. Instead, they help establish basic physical differences between the sexes, says lead investigator Lauren Weiss, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. “Whatever general biological sex differences cause a [variant] to have a different effect on things like height in males and females, those same mechanisms seem to be contributing to autism risk,” she says....

Popular psychology has become a fixture in our society, and its aphorisms, truths and half-truths permeate our everyday existence. A casual stroll through our neighborhood bookstore reveals dozens of self-help, relationship, recovery and addiction books that serve up heaping portions of advice for steering us along life’s rocky road. About 3,500 self-help books are published every year, and numerous new Internet sites on mental health sprout up every month. Much of this information is accurate and useful....

When lawmakers began a heated debate about climate change legislation in 2008, electric utilities Southern Co. and Pacific Gas and Electric Co. spent tens of millions on lobbying efforts. Southern spent $14 million in lobbying related to climate change that year, while PG&E, which openly backed cap-and-trade legislation, spent $27 million and had a carbon footprint 40 times smaller than Southern. To the authors of a new study, the two power companies are more alike than their positions on global warming indicate, and they reflect a trend of corporate lobbying on climate change....

Bangkok, Thailand, represents one future for global transportation. Short trips last hours, whether by bus or car, and by evening traffic can average half a mile an hour in some spots, far slower than walking speed. Bangkok’s nine million or so denizens support two million personal vehicles. “Unfortunately, the personal vehicle has become sort of synonymous with being a rich, civilized person,” notes Steven Plotkin, a transportation energy analyst at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois....

Another climate milestone soared by last weekend when scientists announced that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels hit 415 parts per million for the first time ever (Climatewire, May 7). It’s the latest in a long list of broken records, and like the others, it promises to hold the title temporarily. Atmospheric CO2 is rising at accelerating rates—currently climbing at close to 3 ppm each year, and getting faster. Every year, the world sees new levels that were previously unrecorded in modern human history....

When teenage girls have babies, they are in danger. They more likely will suffer serious health problems than mothers in other age groups and more often will drop out of school and become stuck at low-income levels for life. Children of these teens also navigate a tough road. They are prone to health and behavior trouble, tend not to do well in school and frequently become teen parents themselves. Unfortunately, the U....

Call a large company these days, and you will probably start by having a conversation with a computer. Until recently, such automated telephone speech systems could string together only prerecorded phrases. Think of the robotic-sounding “The number you have dialed … 5 … 5 … 5 … 1 … 2 … 1 … 2….” Unfortunately, this stilted computer speech leaves people cold. And because these systems cannot stray from their canned phrases, their abilities are limited....

Over the past decade, the forests of North America have been gripped by some of the worst mountain pine beetle epidemics in history. Driven by record-high temperatures and frequent drought, beetle kill has expanded more than twentyfold across the American West. In central British Columbia, the insects have destroyed more than 14 million hectares of trees – an area the size of Connecticut – in the single largest outbreak the world has ever seen....

The 1990s and 2000s were glorious decades to be a psychiatrist. It seemed as though each year several new, potentially life-changing medications were brought to market. Options became available to tackle long-standing, treatment-resistant disorders. It did not hurt that big pharma had deep pockets to promote the new offerings. Stigmas were falling, more people were seeking help than ever before, and just about any psychiatrist could brag about patients who, with the right medication and a little time, returned looking more confident and reporting fewer symptoms....

The human brain is considered to be pretty quick, but it lacks many of qualities of a super-efficient computer. For instance, we have trouble switching between tasks and cannot seem to actually do more than one thing at a time. So despite the increasing options—and demands—to multitask, our brains seem to have trouble keeping tabs on many activities at once. A new study, however, illustrates how the brain can simultaneously keep track of two separate goals, even while it is busy performing a task related to one of the aims, hinting that the mind might be better at multitasking than previously thought....

Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for U.S. adults under the age of 50, killing more than 70,000 people in 2017 alone. This grim fact has left researchers and health professionals scrambling to mitigate the devastation caused by the opioid epidemic. Harm-reduction tactics such as making the opioid antidote, naloxone, freely available have been implemented in some states, but too many people still do not receive the lifesaving drug in time....

Parents often wonder what their little ones are absorbing from them. For example, my mother had a wonderful vocabulary. So it may be more than a family fable that when I was asked as a two-year-old whether I was wet, I allegedly responded, “No, I’m saturated.” Then again, my father has always tended to interpret things quite literally, which may explain why, a year or two later, my supposed response to the question of how my favorite record went was “’round and around and around....