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Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and nine Senate supporters kicked off the autumn global warming debate today with a campaign-style rally releasing their comprehensive climate bill. “We know clean energy is the ticket to strong, sustainable economic growth,” Boxer, the chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said at the Capitol Hill event, in front of a large American flag and three dozen or so military veterans, business leaders and environmentalists....

Even before the results of the 2016 presidential election were official, women on social media began offering a tip for surviving the next four years: get an IUD tomorrow. Small, plastic T-shaped devices loaded with synthetic hormones or wrapped with copper coil, IUDs—or intrauterine devices—are inserted into the uterus to offer pregnancy prevention for years. Along with less frequently used hormonal implants that go in the arm, they are known in the reproductive health field as long-acting reversible contraception, or LARC....

The humble baker’s yeast has been enlisted to serve the needs of humanity, responsible for beer, wine and bread, among other staples. A domesticated servant for at least millennia, the microscopic fungus has now had one of its chromosomes swapped out by a host of undergraduate students in favor of a pared-down, synthetic version. A chromosome is a twisted strand of DNA, the genetic code that tells an organism’s cellular machinery what proteins to produce, among other vital functions....

By Laura Zuckerman(Reuters) - Biologists scrambled on Thursday to unravel the mystery behind a massive fish kill in a popular manmade lake in Nevada that draws thousands of anglers each winter for prized game fish such as trout.More than 100,000 stocked fish such as bass and catfish are estimated to have perished in the lake in the northern city of Sparks in recent weeks in an unprecedented die-off that has destroyed the entire fishery, said Chris Healy, spokesman for the state Department of Wildlife....

Friends and family of people with depression may feel that their loved one has been replaced by a gloomy doppelgänger. According to recent research, however, it may be the treatment of depression that actually causes personality changes in people with the disorder. Experts have long known that the placebo effect explains much of the mood lift patients report after going on antidepressants. This was the case in the new study, published in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry—patients with major depressive disorder who were given a placebo saw their symptoms im­prove about three quarters as much as those given paroxetine, an antidepressant also known as Paxil....

Surely if a dog is man’s best friend, then dogs must also be the best buds of scientists and their pursuit of knowledge. Consider this statistic: assuming that dog ownership among scientists mirrors that of the U.S. population at large, there are just over half a million scientists who are dog owners in the U.S. alone. Now, if those dog-friendly households each keep 1.7 dogs under their roofs (like in the general populace), that means there are just shy of one million scientist-owned dogs in the States....

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has approved the design of a new kind of reactor, known as a small modular reactor (SMR). The design, from the Portland, Ore.–based company NuScale Power, is intended to speed construction, lower cost and improve safety over traditional nuclear reactors, which are typically many times larger. Supporters of SMRs have long touted them as a way to help revive the country’s nuclear industry and widen the spread of low-carbon electricity....

Two years ago a Swedish research team announced that they had performed a revolutionary feat: For the first time they had helped a woman born without a uterus give birth to her own child. They had transplanted a uterus from a 61-year-old volunteer into a 35-year-old patient, waited a year for the recipient to heal and finally implanted an embryo that had been previously created through in vitro fertilization. The baby boy was born prematurely—32 weeks into the pregnancy—but ultimately he survived and is now a healthy infant in day care....

Any drug that substantively delayed or stopped Alzheimer’s would be an immediate blockbuster, perhaps exceeding sales for Prozac or Lipitor. No such drugs are on the market because investigators are still trying to understand how to alter the underlying mechanisms by which the disease causes dementia. Drugs that impede amyloid buildup offer a case in point: a number of drug possibilities at various stages of testing can purportedly inhibit amyloid accumulation or foster its clearance....

Pictures of grinning kids may reveal more than childhood happiness: a study from DePauw University shows that how intensely people smile in childhood photographs, as indicated by crow’s feet around the eyes, predicts their adult marriage success. According to the research, people whose smiles were weakest in snapshots from childhood through young adulthood were most likely to report being divorced in middle and old age. Among the weakest smilers in college photographs, one in four ended up divorcing, compared with one in 20 of the widest smilers....

One morning in South Africa’s mountainous Lajuma Research Center, an adult female samango monkey came down from the trees to search for peanuts in an experimental food dispenser. Every once in a while she scanned her surroundings for predators, but she never bothered to look behind her once she realized that Katarzyna Nowak was there. Animals that are not at the top of their food chains are adept at avoiding their predators....

In this month’s election, where health and science issues such as the COVID pandemic and President Donald Trump’s handling of it played enormous roles, new science-oriented candidates for U.S. Congress had a large number of losses. Despite national events, many voters apparently were not swayed by the pro-science campaigns of these newcomers. Incumbents with science backgrounds did see more success. This year 27 candidates—incumbents as well as new challengers—were endorsed by the science advocacy group 314 Action....

Better satellite coverage of wildfires and improved climate models are giving scientists a more accurate view of smoke plumes as they drift across the country. These kinds of advances, they say, can help provide earlier warnings to residents endangered by wildfire smoke. A breakthrough in the field occurred during the deadly 2018 Camp Fire in California that killed 88 people, destroyed 19,000 structures and exposed 8 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area to some of the world’s most polluted air for two weeks....

In experiments starting in 1939, American social psychologists Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark discovered that black children preferred to play with dolls that were white. Their data helped to convince the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education that separate education was inherently unequal. Now civil-rights lawyers are turning once again to psychology as a way to reveal the powerful hidden barriers created by modern-day bias. In battles over issues from affirmative action to workplace discrimination, educators, political theorists and activists are relying on Stanford University social psychologist Claude Steele’s studies on “stereotype threat” to argue for policies that might make access to jobs and education fair for everyone....

By Agnieszka Barteczko and Henning GloysteinWARSAW/LONDON (Reuters) - Poland, one of the heaviest polluters in Europe, will become even dirtier now that its shale gas ambitions have faded and it turns to cheap domestic lignite coal to secure its energy supply.Poland already relies on coal to produce more than 90 percent of its electricity and is home to the European installation that emits the most carbon dioxide - utility PGE’s lignite power plant in Belchatow....

Climate change activists are pressing Qatar to pledge an emissions reduction target, money for vulnerable countries or some other significant contribution to the fight against global warming as it welcomes diplomats today to annual U.N. climate talks. One of the world’s top oil- and gas-producing nations, Qatar also boasts one of the world’s highest gross domestic products per capita. As host of the 18th Conference of the Parties (COP 18) to the U....

NEW YORK CITY—A magnitude 5.8 earthquake that shook parts of the mid-Atlantic U.S. and New England Tuesday afternoon sent workers and residents streaming outdoors. In Lower Manhattan, surrounding the Scientific American office, vehicle traffic quickly came to a standstill—with New York Police Department officers ordering drivers to back their vehicles out of the Holland Tunnel. People streamed out onto the sidewalks and into neighborhood cafes as buildings were evacuated as a precautionary measure....

Cloudy, yellowish “fibrous diamonds” are too unsightly for most jewelers. But for scientists, their crystalline structure holds valuable secrets stretching back a billion years or more. Yaakov Weiss, an earth scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and his colleagues crushed portions of South African fibrous diamonds to extract tiny pockets of fluid trapped within. This fluid, from which the diamonds once formed, holds a unique record of long-ago conditions deep within Earth....

“Mr. Watson, come here!” Alexander Graham Bell uttered these first words over a telephone 138 years ago. With that statement he ushered in the telecommunications revolution that would ultimately bring us mobile phones, the Internet, and near-instantaneous exchanges of speech, text and video across continents. Yet speech can be limiting. Some abstract concepts and emotions can be difficult to convey with words. And certain disabilities rob people of their full communicative powers even as their minds remain otherwise intact....

Key Concepts Geology Weathering Physics Chemistry Introduction Have you ever visited a canyon or cave and wondered how those formations came to be? Or observed smooth stones by a river or beach? These results are due to a process called weathering. Weathering, or the wearing-away of rock by exposure to the elements, not only creates smooth rocks as well as caves and canyons, but it also slowly eats away at other hard objects, including some statues and buildings....