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President Trump’s nominee to be second in command at U.S. EPA helped kill bipartisan climate legislation during his time as a top Senate aide. Andrew Wheeler, nominated by Trump yesterday to be EPA deputy administrator under Scott Pruitt, spent years as the staff director for the Senate’s leading climate skeptic and former Environment and Public Works chairman, Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.). During the George W. Bush administration, the Senate considered a series of bipartisan cap-and-trade climate bills that each sputtered out....

The way the world gets its electricity is undergoing a rapid transition, driven by both the increased urgency of decarbonizing energy systems and the plummeting costs of wind and solar technology. In the past decade electricity generated by renewables in the U.S. has doubled, primarily from wind and solar installations, according to the Energy Information Administration. In January 2019 the EIA forecast that wind, solar and other nonhydroelectric renewables would be the fastest-growing slice of the electricity portfolio for the next two years....

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - Everyone with HIV should be given antiretroviral drugs as soon as possible after diagnosis, meaning 37 million people worldwide should be on treatment, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Wednesday. Recent clinical trials have confirmed that early drug use extends the lives of those with HIV and cuts the risk of disease transmission to partners, the WHO said in a statement setting out the new goal for its 194 member states....

Long, white vapor trails blending into cirrus clouds and cooling over southeastern England during World War II have led researchers to believe that contrails could influence climate. A new study based on historical data examines Allied air raids, including one on May 11, 1944, in which 1,980 aircraft took flight into Germany. Behind the planes, witnesses described the sky turning white, and temperature records show that the air turned slightly, but significantly, cooler....

Nine researchers filed a federal lawsuit on 8 December against the University of Rochester in New York, its president Joel Seligman and its provost Robert Clark over their handling of alleged sexual harassment by a professor there. Eight of the nine are current or former faculty members in Rochester’s department of brain and cognitive sciences; the ninth is a former graduate student there. They allege that Florian Jaeger, a cognitive scientist in the department who studies human-language processing, sexually harassed students and created a hostile work environment....

Dynamically self-assembling robots would certainly be more versatile than those preassembled in a lab or factory. Instead of buying a single bot, you would be shipped a container of modules that you could program to assume a variety of configurations for specific tasks—for example, a snakelike automaton that can crawl through pipes or a legged robot that can climb over rugged terrain. One approach to building such robots would be creating intelligent modules that could gather together, morphing into the shape laid out by their programming (picture the form-shifting T-1000 in Terminator 2)....

Editors’ Introduction It’s a common fantasy to imagine that you’re the last person left alive on earth. But what if all human beings were suddenly whisked off the planet? That premise is the starting point for The World without Us, a new book by science writer Alan Weisman, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. In this extended thought experiment, Weisman does not specify exactly what finishes off Homo sapiens; instead he simply assumes the abrupt disappearance of our species and projects the sequence of events that would most likely occur in the years, decades and centuries afterward....

At first Bill Anders thought it was no big deal. He and his Apollo 8 crewmates, Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, were on their fourth orbit of the moon, passing over the far side, farther from home than any human beings had ever been, when they happened to see the Earth beginning to peek out over the lunar horizon. It was December 24, 1968. “Oh, my God, look at that picture over there!...

Kevin Turner was a premier athlete in the National Football League, a fullback who could run, catch and block. At 6’ 1" and roughly 230 pounds, he was slightly undersized for his position, but he had tremendous thrust in his legs and used all of it to launch himself into players who were bigger than he was. He played for the New England Patriots from 1992 to 1994, then joined the Philadelphia Eagles, with whom he stayed until his abrupt retirement in 1999....

One can learn a lot by browsing Twitter. In early October, for example, I found out that one way to tell if a particular lung cancer treatment (anti-PD-1/anti-PD-L1 therapy) is working is if the gray hair of patients returns to its youthful color; eight species of roundworms were discovered living in California’s Mono Lake despite its high levels of arsenic; and, seriously, the president of the United States tweeted that Democrats “are continuing to interfere in the 2016 Election....

Oceans are heating up at breakneck speed, and the warming waters are threatening marine animals all over the world. That’s the alarming takeaway from a pair of new studies on marine warming published this week in the journal PLOS Climate. The first study looks back in time to find out how the oceans have changed since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began rapidly pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Using historical temperature records dating back to the 1800s, scientists Kisei Tanaka and Kyle Van Houtan evaluated the changing frequency of “extreme marine heat events....

We scrunch. We twist. We pull the skin on our faces or legs taut just so razors can whisk away the undesired hairs sprouting on the fertile landscape of our bodies. Yet many of us do these tasks with a sense of futility, of inevitable failure, because we believe this regular ritual of removal causes hair to grow back mightier than before—rising like a phoenix renewed but with even coarser, thicker or darker offerings....

We both stood anxiously at Maggie Worthen’s bedside, trying to determine if this 23-year-old patient might be able to communicate with us. Nearly two years had passed since the cataclysmic stroke that left her almost entirely paralyzed. We asked her if the woman at the foot of her bed was her mom and instructed her to look down if the answer was yes. We waited, watching Maggie carefully. After several seconds, she replied, gazing slowly downward with her left eye....

Well, what did you expect? sneered old NASA hands, aerospace executives and the many others who hew to the conventional wisdom that safely ushering payloads and especially people hundreds of kilometers above Earth is a job for no less than armies of engineers, technicians and managers backed by billions in funding and decades-long development cycles. Space, after all, is hard. A small, private operation might be able to send a little stunt ship wobbling up tens of kilometers, as entrepreneur-engineer Burt Rutan did in 2004 to win the X-Prize....

Measles debate has reached fever pitch in the United States after an outbreak that began in December at Disneyland in southern California. Many media outlets and politicians have focused on the country’s growing anti-vaccination movement. However, the bigger problem lies elsewhere. The United States was declared free of measles in 2000, and all outbreaks since then have been sparked by imported cases, which will continue to occur until measles is eradicated worldwide....

Covid is credited with propelling clinical innovation. But for a disease that seems to start in people’s noses, none of the available drugs or vaccines are delivered intranasally. Killing the virus before it travels into our lower airways could prevent serious illness. An intranasal vaccine could do this by stimulating the immune system in the mucus of our noses. And intranasal treatments, such as antibodies or small-molecule antivirals, could stop the virus before it infects enough cells to cause disease....

Africa is already beleaguered by infectious diseases, such as AIDS and malaria, but now the continent’s residents face growing health threats from preventable illnesses brought on by lifestyle changes, such as from poor diets and smoking. In an effort to stave off these maladies, advocates have turned their sights on tobacco use, which is on the rise throughout Africa and projected to double by 2021. Of the approximately one billion people across the world who use tobacco, 60 million to 80 million live in Africa....

NASA announced today that the first soil sample baked in the Phoenix Mars Lander shows no signs of water. No surprise, considering that the crusty sample sat stubbornly on a protective screen for several days before slipping into the oven below, giving whatever ice the dirt might have contained plenty of time to sublimate away. In the first run of the Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA), described in a press conference, Phoenix heated a soil sample to 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees C) and then to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C)....

In the search for life beyond Earth, false alarms abound. Researchers have generally considered, and rejected, claims ranging from a 1970s report of life on Mars to the 1990s ‘discovery’ of fossilized space microbes in a meteorite. Now, inspired by the detection of thousands of planets beyond the Solar System, NASA has started a fresh effort to learn how to recognize extraterrestrial life. The goal is to understand what gases alien life might produce—and how Earth-bound astronomers might detect such ‘biosignatures’ in light passing through the atmospheres of planets trillions of kilometres away (see ‘Searching for alien life’)....

Throughout the history of the U.S. human spaceflight program, a peculiarly American rhetoric of manifest destiny, frontier conquest and exploitation has dominated official and public discourse. Take, for example, the credo of the Space Frontier Foundation, an American nonprofit advocacy group “dedicated to opening the Space Frontier to human settlement as rapidly as possible … creating a freer and more prosperous life for each generation by using the unlimited energy and material resources of space....