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“The big beast stood like an uncouth statue, his hide black in the sunlight; he seemed what he was, a monster surviving over from the world’s past, from the days when the beasts of the prime ran riot in their strength, before man grew so cunning of brain and hand as to master them.” Theodore Roosevelt, former U.S. president and renowned big-game hunter, waxed poetic about a massive bull rhinoceros in his 1910 book, “African Game Trails: An Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist,” after glimpsing the rhino during a safari in British East Africa and the Belgian Congo earlier that year....

The National Association of Manufacturers is trying to get out of a landmark climate change lawsuit that a group of children filed against the U.S. government. In court papers submitted yesterday, lawyers for the industrial businesses trade organization indicated they were simply interested in streamlining the case, but otherwise provided little explanation for withdrawing. In 2015, NAM along with the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers intervened in the youth-led lawsuit against the federal government for allowing decades’ worth of greenhouse gas emissions to balloon into the atmosphere, despite its institutional knowledge of climate change....

On March 4 a four-metric-ton spent rocket stage will end its uncontrolled, 7.5-year voyage through space with a flourish: it will slam into the far side of the moon, close to the 570-kilometer-wide crater Hertzsprung, at about 9,300 kilometers per hour, creating a modest crater of its own. Earth is no stranger to space junk falling from the sky, most of which burns up in the atmosphere or splashes down into the ocean....

Scientists in Canada have created a hybrid sodium ion capacitor (NIC) from peanut shells in a pioneering study bridging the gap between conventional ion batteries and supercapacitors. A hybrid ion capacitor is capable of storing charge both electrostatically and electrochemically, providing an intermediate in terms of energy and power between traditional batteries and supercapacitors. “In conventional batteries the cathode often limits performance and so what people are starting to do is swap regular cathodes for supercapacitor cathodes,” explains David Mitlin, from the University of Alberta, who led the research....

A Republican sweep of the Senate this week has put President Obama’s climate agenda in the cross hairs, with EPA’s proposed rule on power plant carbon emissions as an obvious early target. While control of the Senate may not give Republicans the ability to quash the rule outright, it does indicate that that U.S. EPA and the president will face pushback every step of the way between now and the rule’s completion, according to legal experts who spoke this week on the election’s outcome and its implications for the Clean Power Plan....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - A study by University of Miami scientists says mahi-mahi, a popular fish among restaurants and anglers and exposed as infants to oil from the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon spill, swim nearly half as fast as their unaffected counterparts. “The worry is that if you have reduced swimming performance you’re going to be less effective at capturing prey, and less effective in avoiding (predators),” said Martin Grosell, a professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science....

Bisphenol A (BPA) is a ubiquitous compound in plastics. First synthesized in 1891, the chemical has become a key building block of plastics from polycarbonate to polyester; in the U.S. alone more than 2.3 billion pounds (1.04 million metric tons) of the stuff is manufactured annually. Since at least 1936 it has been known that BPA mimics estrogens, binding to the same receptors throughout the human body as natural female hormones....

Researchers have long believed that problems with mitochondria—the power plants of cells—underlie some cases of Parkinson’s disease. Now a new study details those problems, and suggests that they may form a common thread linking previously unexplained cases of the disease with those caused by different genetic anomalies or toxins. Finding a common mechanism behind different suspected causes of Parkinson’s suggests that there might also be a common means to measure, treat or cure it, says Marco Baptista, research director at the nonprofit Michael J....

The brain has long enjoyed a privileged status as psychology’s favorite body organ. This is, of course, unsurprising given that the brain instantiates virtually all mental operations, from understanding language, to learning that fire is dangerous, to recalling the name of one’s kindergarten teacher, to categorizing fruits and vegetables, to predicting the future. Arguing for the importance of the brain in psychology is like arguing for the importance of money in economics....

UNCONSCIOUS BIAS? As a subscriber to Scientific American Mind, I was very disappointed to see your cover story “Seven Deadly Sins” illustrated by a dark-skinned woman. Centuries of negative, harmful stereotyping have associated women with sin and portrayed non-Caucasians as dangerous. Did no one question this choice during the design process? The table of contents page uses a compelling graphic, and any number of images of white male devils could have been used....

Nine years ago on a Monday afternoon, Sandra Smith, a pastor’s wife and mother of three in DeWitt, Mich., learned she had an aggressive form of breast cancer. The real bad news, however, would hit the family later that week. At first they thought their youngest, six-year-old Andrew, was just battling the flu. Then he started vomiting. He’d also developed a facial droop, and his gait seemed off. Smith remembers wondering if they were “making a big deal out of nothing,” even as they rushed to the emergency room....

In 1956 Roger Revelle and Hans Suess, geochemists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California, pointed out the need to measure carbon dioxide in the air and ocean so as to obtain “a clearer understanding of the probable climatic effects of the predicted great industrial production of carbon-dioxide over the next 50 years.” In other words, they wanted to figure out how dire the situation would be today. That they had to argue the importance of such observations now seems astonishing, but at the time scientists did not know for certain whether the carbon dioxide spewing out of tailpipes and smokestacks would indeed accumulate in the atmosphere....

Scientists have identified a long-sought fertility protein that allows sperm to dock to the surface of an egg. The finding, an important step in understanding the process that enables conception, could eventually spawn new forms of birth control and treatments for infertility.“It’s very important, because we now know two of the proteins that are responsible for the binding of sperm to the egg,” says Paul Wassarman, a biochemist and developmental biologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York....

Finally, the world might be catching a break when it comes to drug-resistant gonorrhea. A new study suggests that a vaccine that protects against a strain of meningitis may also ward off the sexually transmitted infection. The research, conducted in New Zealand, found that the gonorrhea rate among teens and young adults there who had received a meningitis B vaccine during an emergency campaign in the early 2000s was significantly lower than the rate seen in people of the same age who weren’t vaccinated....

An economic chill will soon arrive in the world market that provides the batteries that power electric cars. For U.S. manufacturers of these batteries, the most valuable and competitive part of the electric car, the question is whether they will survive this winter or perish in it. Over the past three years, new production lines for lithium-ion batteries have sprung up in China, Korea, Japan and the United States. Some have been built solely with private capital, by companies that sense a healthy global market for energy security and carbon dioxide reduction....

If you think you know what you just said, think again. People can be tricked into believing they have just said something they did not, researchers report this week.The dominant model of how speech works is that it is planned in advance — speakers begin with a conscious idea of exactly what they are going to say. But some researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that people know what they are saying in part through hearing themselves speak....

Since the early 1960s membership in the club of tool users has expanded from humans to chimpanzees and beyond. To date, it includes elephants, dolphins, octopuses, crows, ravens, rooks, jays, dingoes and dogs (sort of). Among birds, tool use has been well documented in corvids (crows, rooks, jays, ravens), but evidence is scant in other bird families. Now a parrot named Figaro may pave the way for admission into the tool-use club for his species, Goffin’s cockatoo, also known as the Tanimbar corella or Goffin’s corella (Cacatua goffini)....

Astronomers have confirmed that an object they thought was a distant galaxy is actually the brightest extra-galactic pulsar ever seen. The team made the discovery using a technique that blocks a particular type of polarized light, similar to polarized sunglasses, which could be used to spy more ‘hidden’ pulsars. Pulsars are highly magnetized spinning neutron stars that form from the collapsed remnants of exploded stars. As pulsars spin, they release a stream of radio waves from their poles — a ‘pulse’ that can be detected using radio telescopes....

COVID-19 exacerbated various preexisting racial health disparities, which ushered in a racial reckoning in the medical field. As a result, many medical institutions attempted to implement meaningful changes to dismantle systemic racism within their teaching and clinical environments. Yet, a tool used daily by almost every physician, the history of present illness (HPI), may still perpetuate medical racism. “A 21-year-old African American female presented in the emergency department with diabetic ketoacidosis....

By David Schwartz PHOENIX (Reuters) - Parts of Utah and Colorado were placed under flash flood warnings on Tuesday, a day after the drought-stricken U.S. Southwest was hit by a record downpour that turned highways into lakes and killed two women washed away by fast-flowing waters. Drier weather brought some relief to southern Arizona, which was hard hit on Monday. In the city of Mesa, east of Phoenix, more than 100 homes were affected by floods, and images showed streets and children’s playgrounds partially submerged....