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California is pushing a novel approach to dealing with beachfront houses threatened by rising seas: Buy and rent them out until they’re eventually demolished. The goal is finding a less explosive way to implement the volatile idea of managed retreat or removing homes threatened by waves. Many Golden State lawmakers and regulators back that idea over armoring California’s iconic coastline with sea walls that experts say accelerate beach erosion. But managed retreat is a phrase politicians try to avoid because it angers beachfront homeowners....

By Alister Doyle The rate of carbon emissions is higher than at any time in fossil records stretching back 66 million years to the age of the dinosaurs, according to a study on Monday that sounds an alarm about risks to nature from man-made global warming. Scientists wrote that the pace of emissions even eclipses the onset of the biggest-known natural surge in fossil records, 56 million years ago, that was perhaps driven by a release of frozen stores of greenhouse gases beneath the seabed....

What is the common thread among Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases, Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome and even type 2 diabetes? Patients who suffer from these diseases typically harbor a bodily buildup of oddly formed proteins called amyloid fibrils, which resemble long, twisted ribbons. Although the proteins making up the fibrils differ in each disease, a new study suggests that fibrils of all types share a feature—the tiny molecular backbones that seed the production of the fibrils and sew them together....

SPANISH PAINTER EL GRECO often depicted elongated human figures and objects in his work. Some art historians have suggested that he might have been astigmatic—that is, his eyes’ corneas or lenses may have been more curved horizontally than vertically, causing the image on the retina at the back of the eye to be stretched vertically. But surely this idea is absurd. If it were true, then we should all be drawing the world upside down, because the retinal image is upside down!...

In 2014, I was in ballet class when I got a call from the hospital that my dad had experienced a stroke. I rushed to the hospital to join him, and found him buried in a nest of cables, surrounded by a variety of monochromatic, rapidly beeping assistive machines. They seemed to form a single, massive enclosure around him. Every few moments he would peer up at one of the machines with wide, confused eyes....

Alco Transportation in southwest Detroit had a bunch of big, old semi-trucks. The company wanted to bring their fleet up to date and in line with federal diesel emissions standards. But being green isn’t cheap when you’re hauling steel. “Trucks used to be $110,000 … $120,000,” said Christopher Burcham, who co-owns SteelPro, the umbrella company that markets Alco Transportation, a steel hauling company. “Now it costs $150,000 for a brand new diesel truck....

A new network of observatories aims to take ecological science to the continental scale in the next 30 years. The National Science Foundation–sponsored network, called the National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, will link 20 field stations selected to provide data from 20 distinct U.S. biomes as well as 40 portable stations that can be moved from site to site. NEON will monitor how large-scale problems such as climate change, pollution and urban sprawl affect ecosystems as diverse as the Great Lakes and Hawaii....

A good book evokes a variety of emotions as you read. Turns out, though, that almost all novels and plays provide one of only six “emotional experiences” from beginning to end—a rags-to-riches exuberance, say, or a rise and fall of hope (below, top). Researchers at the University of Vermont graphed the happiness and sadness of words that occurred across the pages of more than 1,300 fiction works to reveal the emotional arcs and discovered relatively few variations....

One of the many issues that have flummoxed scientists researching COVID-19 is the nose-to-toes diversity of its symptoms, which extend well beyond the usual range of respiratory infections: from loss of smell to blood clots and stroke to limb pain and discolored COVID toes. One of the most common nonrespiratory manifestations is gastrointestinal trouble. As many as 50 percent of COVID patients have nausea, diarrhea and/or abdominal pain. And according to a Canadian review paper, for 16 percent in one large study, those were the only symptoms....

The white-hot river of liquid iron never stops. Every hour of the day and night, at this steel plant in Sweden’s far north, the metal pours out of a hole at the bottom of a massive, 90-metre-tall blast furnace. Equally relentless, a stream of carbon dioxide belches out of the top. The CO2 is a waste product of the coal that the blast furnace devours. For every tonne of iron that will go to make steel, this furnace produces 1....

The cold snap that sent temperatures plunging last week and brought the most frigid new year in recorded history, in some places, had nothing to do with climate change, according to a new study. In recent years, climate scientists have studied the connection between global warming and freezing temperatures. They are examining how shifting air patterns over the Arctic, and their incursion into North America and Europe, are connected to climate change....

Intricate, symmetric patterns, in tiles and stucco, cover the walls and ceilings of Alhambra, the “red fort,” the dreamlike castle of the medieval Moorish kings of Andalusia. Seemingly endless in variety, the two dimensionally periodic patterns are nevertheless governed by the mathematical principles of group theory and can be classified into a finite number of types: precisely seventeen, as shown by Russian crystallographer Evgraf Federov. The artists of medieval Andalusia are unlikely to have been aware of the mathematics of space groups, and Federov was unaware of the art of Alhambra....

By Sharon Weinberger of Nature magazineAdvocates of international trade and collaboration in space technology thought that they were making headway against rules that restrict both in the name of US security. But on the same day that the US government released a long-awaited report that recommends easing those regulations, allegations surfaced that a NASA director may have broken the rules when he gave foreign nationals access to an agency research facility....

Mammals are not big on monogamy. In fewer than 10 percent of species is it common for two individuals to mate exclusively. The primate wing of the group is only slightly more prone to pairing off. Although 15 to 29 percent of primate species favor living together as couples, far fewer commit to monogamy as humans know it—an exclusive sexual partnership between two individuals. When it comes to monogamy, humans obviously have an imperfect track record....

Pluto was still a planet when a spacecraft began its journey nine years ago to that small, cold hunk of rock and ice. This month the nasa probe—the fastest spacecraft ever launched—finally reaches its primary target after a five-billion-kilometer cruise. On July 14 it will fly past what is now classified as a dwarf planet, becoming the first spacecraft to visit that faraway world and in doing so completing the initial exploration of our solar system that was conceived with the first interplanetary missions half a century ago....

Edited by Dava Sobel The Dead Sea scrolls were mostly saved by bribe and threat: unmindful finders re-interred the rest in hopes of gain. It vanished or decayed. A trooper in the Greek campaign blown by Wehrmacht mortars down a limestone chute, glimpsed there a lettered chest—lost masterworks? new graphs by Euclid or his heirs, perhaps. Never reclaimed: the next rounds covered it up again. Fountains of blazing loam, then forced retreat—the blasted ground left no remains of site-map to be guessed....

A dozen years ago the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held its first “grand challenge” to see if autonomous automobiles could cross a 240-kilometer stretch of the Mojave Desert on their own. Mechanical problems and mishaps ended the race before any of the competitors had gone more than 12 kilometers. DARPA, the U.S. Department of Defense’s research arm, is looking for a better outcome Thursday in its inaugural Cyber Grand Challenge, where seven autonomous computers battle one another in what the agency claims is the “world’s first all-machine hacking tournament....

Dr. Jon A. Morse is the chief executive officer of the nonprofit BoldlyGo Institute, which is dedicated to advancing basic research and discovery from space through privately funded missions and public-private partnerships, and former director of the Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. Morse contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. Basic research in the space sciences holds essentially limitless potential for tackling profound questions of our existence and opening the doors of exploration, innovation and future economic opportunity....

The Environmental Protection Agency’s website has begun to transform under the Trump administration. A group of researchers have found what are likely the first steps in a major overhaul of a site that’s been closely watched since President Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20. Federal climate plans created under former President Obama, tribal assistance programs, and references to international cooperation have been stricken from the site. A mention of carbon pollution as a cause of climate change has also been removed and adaptation has been emphasized, indicating an attempt to separate the cause of climate change from the response....

President Trump’s diluted Clean Power Plan is unlikely to save the coal industry, but it represents a setback for U.S. efforts to address climate change, analysts say. In removing a government cap on power plant emissions, Trump leaves American climate policy to the whims of the power market, one of the few areas of the economy to post steep emissions reductions in recent years. The combination of cheap natural gas, stagnating power demand and advancements in wind and solar has prompted a wave of coal plant closures and slashed power-sector emissions....