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Three former secretaries of the U.S. Treasury yesterday forcefully urged the Securities and Exchange Commission to manage financial disclosures related to climate change. In a letter to the SEC, the bipartisan trio of secretaries Henry Paulson (R), Robert Rubin (D) and George Shultz (R) applauded the agency for issuing in 2010 a blueprint to help businesses explain how climate change affects them. But, they said, that measure isn’t enough. “We recommend that the Commission now move to promote and enforce mandatory and meaningful disclosures of the material effects of climate change on issuers,” they wrote....

Seville, Spain, announced yesterday a new program to combat deadly heat. It plans to start naming and ranking its heat waves, similar to tropical storms and hurricanes. It will be the first city in the world to implement such a system, according to officials speaking at a public announcement yesterday. The initiative “is very much in line with the profile of Seville, a city that is fighting for sustainability and against climate change, and a city that is helping to adapt to the current climate change effects,” said Seville Mayor Juan Espadas....

Adapted from The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, by Lindsey Fitzharris, by Arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US), Penguin Press (UK), Bompiani (Italy), Editora Intrinseca (Portugal), Editorial Debate (Spain), Ginkgo (Beijing) Book Co. (China), Het Spectrum (Netherlands), Lindhardt & Ringhof (Denmark), Locus Publishing Company (Taiwan), Suhrkamp Verlag (Germany), Znak (Poland). Copyright © 2017 by Lindsey Fitzharris. All Rights Reserved As the veteran surgeon Robert Liston stood before those gathered in the new operating theater of University College London a few days before Christmas 1846, he held in his hands the jar of clear liquid ether that might do away with the need for speed in surgery....

Physicists at Beijing’s Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) are designing the world’s biggest particle smasher. If built, the 100-kilometre-circumference facility would dwarf the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland—and would cost around half the price. The ambitious 30-billion-yuan (US$4.3-billion) facility, known as the Circular Electron–Positron Collider (CEPC), is the brainchild of IHEP’s director, Wang Yifang. He has spearheaded the project since the discovery of the elementary particle called the Higgs boson at the LHC in 2012....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Just as ancient Greeks fantasized about soaring flight, today’s imaginations dream of melding minds and machines as a remedy to the pesky problem of human mortality. Can the mind connect directly with artificial intelligence, robots and other minds through brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies to transcend our human limitations? Over the last 50 years, researchers at university labs and companies around the world have made impressive progress toward achieving such a vision....

Decades of chemical pollution have damaged the ozone layer of the upper atmosphere that shields Earth from the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, each summer eating a hole over the South Pole that expands to nearly the size of Antarctica. But since 1996, when an international treaty banned the culprit chemical refrigerants and propellants (known as CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons), the size of the seasonal tear has been shrinking—and scientists predict it may stop forming by the end of this century....

An Indian-made rocket called PSLV-C37 soared 310 miles into the Earth’s ionosphere last February and launched 104 space satellites, spitting them out rapidly from both sides. It was a world record for India and a critical milestone for U.S. companies and institutions, which built 96 of the hand-sized orbiters. The feat called attention to a new space race, one featuring tiny satellites that are roughly the size of a half-gallon milk carton and sprout antennas and solar panels....

Humans are, by nature, tribal and never more so than in politics. In the culture wars we all know the tribal stereotypes of what liberals think of con­servatives: Conservatives are a bunch of Hum­mer-driving, meat-eating, gun-toting, hard-drinking, Bible-thumping, black-and-white-thinking, fist-pounding, shoe-stomping, morally hypocritical blowhards. And what conservatives think of liberals: Liberals are a bunch of hybrid-driving, tofu-eating, tree-hugging, whale-saving, sandal-wearing, bottled-water-drinking, ACLU-supporting, flip-flopping, wishy-washy, namby-pamby bed wetters. Like many other stereotypes, each of these contains an element of truth that reflects an emphasis on different moral values....

Astronomers’ mental image of Titan, the solar system’s second-largest moon, used to be that of a vast swimming pool. But maybe they should have imagined a water bed instead. Last year, researchers reported that radar mapping of Titan by the Cassini spacecraft had found a peculiar shift in landmarks on the moon’s surface of up to 19 miles (30 kilometers) between October 2004 and May 2007. Now investigators say the best explanation is a moon-wide underground ocean that disconnects Titan’s icy crust from its rocky interior....

Having a child changes the way you think. With a baby’s birth, parents become flooded with new responsibilities and emotions. In this special report, we explore how those experiences forge a bond between parent and child. The connection does not depend on shared genes, as many adoptive moms and dads can attest. Nor does preg­nancy explain it all. The challenges of child care rewire both parents’ brains so that being a mother or father becomes easier....

A coalition of 17 U.S. states filed a legal challenge on Wednesday against efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration to roll back climate change regulations, deepening a political rift over his emerging energy policies. Led by New York state, the coalition said the administration has a legal duty to regulate emissions of the gases scientists believe cause global climate change. “The law is clear: the EPA must limit carbon pollution from power plants,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said in a statement announcing the challenge....

Some butterflies migrate thousands of miles a year, yet scientists have conjectured that most other insects spend their lives pretty much in one place. Not so. A 10-year study found that more than 3.3 trillion insects migrate high above southern Britain every year, especially in spring and fall. “People thought insects were passive and just got accidentally blown about,” says researcher Jason W. Chapman of the University of Exeter in England....

President Trump likely would scoff at any suggestion that his desire for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border has anything to do with climate change. But researchers in fields from geography to behavioral science increasingly have drawn a connection between global warming and mass migration—and a related rise in anti-immigrant nationalism in both Europe and the United States. So Trump wasn’t wrong when he recently highlighted the fact that Europe has built a rash of border barriers in recent years....

Jay Inslee finally has a climate win—and another state is headed for carbon-free electricity. The Washington House of Representatives’ vote last week to zero out emissions from the state’s power sector represents a potential turning point, both for America’s most vocal climate hawk and for state efforts to curb carbon dioxide. State House and Senate negotiators still must reconcile their separate versions of the legislation, but that is a mere formality....

Expecting a baby often provokes mixed emotions—wonder and amazement but also concern. Will the child be healthy? Happy? Find his or her spot in the world? Several prenatal blood tests are now available that attempt to ease some of the anxiety—at least about health. By analyzing trace amounts of fetal DNA in a pregnant woman’s bloodstream, these tests (which go by such names as Harmony, MaterniT21 PLUS and verifi) can identify various genetic anomalies up to six months before birth....

Jeff Waldstreicher, a meteorologist with NOAA’s National Weather Service, provides this answer. Sunlight passing through raindrops causes rainbows via a process called refraction, which is the bending of light as it passes from one medium to another. This is analagous to pushing a shopping cart at the edge of a parking lot: if the wheels on one side roll off the pavement onto an adjacent area of grass, the cart will start to turn toward the grass....

The world produces roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes of digital data per day, adding to a sea of information that includes intimate details about many individuals’ health and habits. To protect privacy, data brokers must anonymize such records before sharing them with researchers and marketers. But a new study finds it is relatively easy to reidentify a person from a supposedly anonymized data set—even when that set is incomplete. Massive data repositories can reveal trends that teach medical researchers about disease, demonstrate issues such as the effects of income inequality, coach artificial intelligence into humanlike behavior and, of course, aim advertising more efficiently....

Not long after the virus that causes AIDS was identified, Margaret Heckler, then the U.S. secretary of health and human services, told a group of reporters that the discovery would enable scientists to develop a vaccine to prevent AIDS. “We hope to have such a vaccine ready for testing in approximately two years,” she declared proudly. It was 1984. Government officials have certainly been spectacularly wrong on other occasions but rarely has a large portion of the scientific community been so overly optimistic as well....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

As many as 2,000 of them hit the streets Friday, joining students and other activists in climate strikes in places like Dublin; Cape Town, South Africa; and Bucharest, Romania. Katrina eventually spurred Walmart Inc. — the largest global retailer — to begin measuring, publishing and reducing its global warming emissions starting in 2008. Eventually, some 5,000 other businesses followed suit, including 150 companies that, like Walmart, began pushing their suppliers to cut their emissions (Climatewire, May 14)....