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While Hurricane Florence was still barreling toward the East Coast, the Navy shipped its vessels out of harm’s way. But the sailors had another problem: What would happen to their cars parked back at base if Florence hit coastal Virginia? While Florence largely steered clear of the cars parked at the naval base in Hampton Roads, Va., the episode was emblematic of the type of cascading problems that planners will increasingly have to take into account....

Will we be surprised again this November the way Americans were on Nov. 9, 2016 when they awoke to learn that reality TV star Donald Trump had been elected president? That outcome defied prognosticators and polls, and even Trump’s own expectation. “Oh, this is gonna be embarrassing,” Trump later recalled he had said at the time, anticipating defeat. Another surprise victory is unlikely to happen again if this election is looked at from the same perspective of neuroscience that I used to account for the surprising outcome in 2016....

New analysis concludes the hots are still getting hotter. The so-called hiatus or pause in global warming over the past 15 years or so has been much on the minds of climate scientists (see here,here, here, here and here), policy makers (see here, here, here and here) and the media (see here, here, here, here and here). While a number of theories have been advanced to explain the hiatus (see here,here and here for example), a comprehensive explanation has yet to be established, and what the hiatus portends for future climate change remainsunclear....

One of the first and most enduring facts most students learn in biology class is that all living cells use a small molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) as fuel. That universal energy currency drives the biological reactions that allow cells to function and life to flourish—making ATP a crucial player in the biological world. Less commonly known, however, is that what is perhaps the most produced and consumed molecule in the human body also has a completely separate but no less essential role outside of cells....

Now the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research organization for the intelligence community modeled after the defense department’s famed DARPA, has dedicated $100 million to a similarly ambitious project. The Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks program, or MICrONS, aims to reverse-engineer one cubic millimeter of the brain, study the way it makes computations, and use those findings to better inform algorithms in machine learning and artificial intelligence. IARPA has recruited three teams, led by David Cox, a biologist and computer scientist at Harvard University, Tai Sing Lee, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, and Andreas Tolias, a neuroscientist at the Baylor College of Medicine....

Most of us do not understand dogs as well as we think we do. We assume we know things, but we often rely on old theories and frequently do not look at actual dog behavior. Instead we should try to think about life from the dog’s perspective. The stories that follow highlight some of the more interesting discoveries that scientists have made about the minds behind all those cute canine faces....

(Adds reports of structural damage) By Heide Brandes OKLAHOMA CITY, May 7 (Reuters) - A series of tornadoes touched down southwest of Oklahoma City on Wednesday, injuring several residents of a trailer park, causing severe flooding and a temporary escape of bears from a wildlife park, officials said. No deaths were reported, but some residents of a trailer park were treated at local hospitals, said Dee Patty, a police spokeswoman. The Oklahoman newspaper reported 12 people injured....

Patrick Vallance, president of research and development at the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, has been appointed as chief scientific adviser, the UK government announced on 8 November. Vallance, a clinical pharmacologist who previously led the medical division at University College London, will replace Mark Walport in April 2018. Walport has left the government to become head of a powerful new funding body called UK Research and Innovation. As chief scientific adviser Vallance will advise the prime minister and cabinet, the government’s most senior decision-making body....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Most likely, this is the best-known picture of a flag ever taken: Buzz Aldrin standing next to the first U.S. flag planted on the Moon. For those who knew their world history, it also rang some alarm bells. Only less than a century ago, back on Earth, planting a national flag in another part of the world still amounted to claiming that territory for the fatherland....

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine will go to three Americans who discovered telomeres, the genetic code that protects the ends of chromosomes, and telomerase, the enzyme that assists in this process, findings that are important in the study of cancer, aging and stem cells. Announced this morning in Stockholm, the three geneticists—Elizabeth Blackburn, a professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, Carol Greider, a professor in the department of molecular biology and genetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and Jack Szostak, a professor of genetics at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who are all previous Scientific American authors—will split the award of 10 million Swedish kronor (about $1....

On Banks Island in Canada’s Northwest Territories, more than 4,000 slow-motion landslides are creeping downhill as thawing permafrost slumps and crumbles. In Siberia, warming earth is allowing underground methane seeps to breach the surface and explode, leaving craters up to 40 meters wide. Across the Arctic, striking change is the new normal, as is incursion by countries and businesses. Construction, oil and natural gas extraction, shipping and tourism are all on the rise....

By Dorene Internicola NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fitness activity trackers have come a long way since Leonardo da Vinci sketched a rudimentary gear-and-pendulum pedometer to track the treks of 15th century Roman soldiers. Today’s devices count calories, measure sleep patterns and monitor heart rates as well as steps. Fitness experts predict their popularity and usefulness will grow as they become more sophisticated. “Two big changes to fitness trackers since last year is that more of them now support heart rate monitoring and several of them have smartwatch functionality,” said Jill Duffy, a senior analyst at the computer magazine PCMag....

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) could move to La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands, if opposition from some Native Hawaiians prevents the next-generation observatory from being built atop the Hawaiian mountain of Mauna Kea, as planned. The decision, announced on October 31 by the TMT International Observatory’s board of governors, creates an alternative path forward for the troubled mega-telescope. The project’s opponents blocked access to the Mauna Kea site in April 2015, halting construction, although work on the telescope’s components continues at sites around the world....

The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time by Jimena Canales Princeton University Press, 2015 (($35)) On April 6, 1922, Einstein clashed with the most famous philosopher of the day, Henri Bergson, about the nature of time. Einstein espoused the picture he formulated in general relativity of time as inseparable from space and lacking the absolute reality that humans tend to perceive in it....

Editor’s Note: We are posting this article from our July 1959 issue to offer an historical perspective on some of the issues being discussed at the United Nations Framework Climate Change Conference in Poznan, Poland, which began December 1 and runs through December 12. The theories that explain worldwide climate change are almost as varied as the weather. The more familiar ones attribute changes of climate to Olympian forces that range from geological upheavals and dust-belching volcanoes to long-term variations in the radiation of the sun and eccentricities in the orbit of the earth....

When marine chemist John Hayes pioneered a way to scrutinize the carbon atoms in seafloor mud 15 years ago, he was trying to unravel mysteries about how dead microbes once lived. Never did he guess that sporting officials would one day use his invention to catch drug cheats. By modifying Hayes’s method to examine the carbon atoms in athletes’ urine, medical researchers at the U.C.L.A. Olympic Laboratory have developed the first definitive screen for synthetic testosterone, a popular anabolic steroid banned by most sports organizations since the 1970s....

Does postpartum depression serve some evolutionary purpose? —Clint Johnson, Ridgecrest, Calif. Anthropologist Edward H. Hagen of Washington State University replies: Postpartum depression (PPD), which af­flicts 10 to 15 percent of new mothers, may have evolved as a strategic response to a lack of social support because it helped in passing on genes successfully. Many doc­tors believe PPD is triggered by the changes in a mother’s hormones after giving birth, yet studies have failed to find much evi­dence for a link between extreme hormone fluctuations and PPD....

Key concepts Chemistry Molecules Diffusion Gradient Solutions Introduction Here is a fun project you can try with leftover candy you have. You will make some amazing art using nothing but colored candy and hot water—and a little bit of science. Save some of your candy and get started! Background Many of the foods we eat are colored with artificial dyes. Some of these dyes will easily dissolve in water. This means that when foods containing the dyes are placed in water, the molecules that make up the dye will break away from the food and start to spread out in the water....

Designs for the world’s largest radio telescope have been scaled back to save money—a decision that astronomers say could affect its ability to peer deep into the Universe’s past. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a telescope 50 times more sensitive than current instruments, is expected to cost billions of dollars. Its final design calls for around 2,000 radio dishes in Africa, together with up to one million antennas in Australia, that will have a total light-collecting area of roughly 1 square kilometre—hence the project’s name....

In “Astronomers Make a Map of a Super Saturn’s Rings,” from the January issue of Scientific American, the Leiden University astronomer Matthew Kenworthy tells the story of discovering a ring system some 200 times larger than Saturn’s around the distant star J1407. Despite its rather large size, across interstellar distances this ring system would normally be totally invisible to us—and in fact Kenworthy and his peers have yet to glimpse J1407b, the giant planet that must be its host....