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California lawmakers yesterday called for the regulation of marijuana farms to protect stream flows and help fish species like coho salmon and steelhead, which face possible extinction as the state’s drought rages on. In an informational hearing of the California State Senate Joint Committee of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Chairman Mike McGuire (D) of Healdsburg argued that a contingent of pot farmers in the state have disregarded the environment in favor of personal profit....

For my hale and hearty father-in-law, the first sign that something was wrong occurred at 88 years of age, when his ever reliable tennis serve kept landing astray. A series of medical tests soon revealed the worst: advanced, metastatic pancreatic cancer. Treatment might buy him a little time, his doctors told him, but that prospect did not outweigh his dread of spending his final days in a toxic and debilitating haze of chemotherapy....

Climate change may be leading to shifts in the communities of sea life beneath an Antarctic ice shelf, researchers say. Scientists diving beneath sea ice at the edge of Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf have discovered unexpected changes in the seafloor ecosystem compared to previous studies of the same area, and they think the thinning of the ice shelf caused by climate change may be to blame. “Surprisingly big changes in the coastal seafloor communities have occurred in only a few years,” Patrick Degerman, one of three researchers from Finland on the expedition along with six from New Zealand, wrote in a dispatch from the team’s camp on the ice shelf near New Harbour in the Ross Sea....

Dear EarthTalk: What’s the latest on efforts to ban plastic bags? How many U.S. locales have instituted some kind of ban, and have these initiatives made a dent in the amount of plastic litter?—Melinda Clarke, New York, NY California made big news recently when it announced the first statewide ban on plastic shopping bags set to kick in during the middle of 2015. Beginning in July, large grocery stores, pharmacies and other food retailers in the Golden State will no longer be able to send shoppers home with plastic bags, while convenience markets, liquor stores and other small food retailers will join the ranks a year later....

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia—From atop Mount Entoto, which rises 10,500 feet above sea level and draws thousands of pilgrims annually as one of this country’s most revered spiritual sites, it is impossible to look upon the sprawling capital below without sensing both the burden of Ethiopia’s history and the promise of its future. Addis Ababa, meaning “new flower” in Amharic, has been shaped by forces both internal and external since its founding in 1887....

A nonpartisan federal watchdog agency assailed the Trump administration’s response to climate change in a damaging new report that criticized President Trump’s reversal of environmental policies imposed by President Obama. The Government Accountability Office, which has warned since 2013 about the nation’s exposure to the impacts of climate change, says the federal government is now failing to make any progress on improving climate resilience. The GAO puts climate change on its high-risk list of vulnerabilities and poorly run federal programs that pose a significant threat to the public....

Ohio annually processes thousands of tons of radioactive waste from hydraulic-fracturing, sending it through treatment facilities, injecting it into its old and unused gas wells and dumping it in landfills. Historically, the handling and disposal of that waste was barely regulated, with few requirements for how its potential contamination would be gauged, or how and where it could be transported and stored. With the business of fracking waste only growing, legislators in 2013 had the chance to decide how best to monitor the state’s vast amounts of toxic material, much of it being trucked into Ohio from neighboring states....

Wanted for long-term occupancy: clean, secure home, must have ample freezer space, 20,000 bedrooms, starting July 2007. An ambitious plan getting under way to learn the function of every gene in the classic lab mouse Mus musculus will require the manufacture of a large living “database” of mutant mice over the next five years, with the ultimate goal of understanding comparable genes in humans. The U.S. component of the multinational effort, the Knockout Mouse Project (KOMP), will target some 10,000 mouse genes, half the rodent’s estimated complement....

The November 2004 issue included “Holes in the Missile Shield,” by Richard L. Garwin, a topic that attracted volleys of letters from all sides. David Caccia of Honokaa, Hawaii, found an additional hole in the shield: “If an enemy nation could produce only a few nuclear weapons, would it risk sending them on rockets, which have a considerable chance of malfunctioning? And even if the launch was successful, the country could expect retaliation....

You might think it would be a good idea to put the two sensors in the centers of the two rectangles. However, a large distance measurement (say, of 75 meters) yields an over-large rectangle to search. Consider going literally outside the box: place the sensor 25 meters to the right of the right border of each 70-by-90 rectangle (that is, 70 meters from the center of the rectangle), assuming the 90-meter-long borders of the rectangle are horizontal....

Back in March 2018 a group of Hollywood elites signed an open letter asking men to take more responsibility for creating workplaces that are free of sexism. The letter was in response to the #MeToo movement that spurred people across the world to use social media to bring attention to the prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse. The letter signers pledged to act as advocates for victims and to speak out openly against sexism, thereby launching #AskMoreofHim, a movement that highlights the role that men play in preventing gender-based violence....

The American industry of motor manufacture by 1914 had taken root in every part of society. Leisure, consumer, commercial, high technology, mass-production, the business was dedicated to production and sales of anything that moved people and goods for whatever reason. The industry, then as now, was a huge part of the industrial and social landscape. The 16th Annual Motor Number from January 3, 1914, listed 150 gasoline truck manufacturers, 20 electric truck makers, 320 gasoline motor car models and 60 electric car models....

The masked shrew is one of the smallest mammals in North America, just a few inches long. Yet it’s recently made a gigantic jump. Over the last few decades, the tiny shrew has migrated more than 4,000 feet up the sides of the Rocky Mountains. Scientists believe it’s trying to escape the heat as climate change warms the mountain range. And it’s not the only one. Dozens of other species are also scrambling higher up the slopes....

In the 1950s psychiatrist Robert Heath of Tulane University launched a controversial program to surgically implant electrodes into the brains of patients institutionalized with epilepsy, schizophrenia, depression and other severe neurological conditions. His initial objective: to locate the biological seat of these disorders and, by artificially stimulating those regions, perhaps cure individuals of their disease. According to Heath, the results were dramatic. Patients who were nearly catatonic with despair could be made to smile, converse, even giggle....

A rose by any other name might not smell as sweet. Edmund Rolls, a psychologist at the University of Oxford, has found that cognition—high-order brain processing—can influence perception of smell at its most primitive level. Rolls presented 12 subjects with an ambiguous odor, which he says “might have been thought to be Brie” but was labeled either “cheddar cheese” or “body odor.” Subjects rated the smell as much more pleasant when it was labeled cheese....

The mind-bending possibilities of quantum physics lend themselves to philosophy—to wondering about the theory’s implications for the meaning of life, the idea of free will, the fate of us all. A talented pool of writers have capitalized on those implications to produce an impressive array of entries in this year’s Quantum Shorts contest, which invites short fiction based on the ideas of quantum mechanics. Scientific American and Nature partnered with the Center for Quantum Technologies in Singapore, which organizes the annual competition....

On his way from Princeton University to the New Jersey state capitol building in Trenton a few weeks ago, Andrew Zwicker was noticeably amped. Zwicker is the head of scientific education at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, but he was en route to his other job: state lawmaker. He was excited because he was about to make a presentation about policy using a toy-size plastic car. “I can’t imagine any lawmaker has ever done this before,” he says....

The driver of the high-speed train that derailed July 25 at a sharp curve in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, killing at least 80 passengers and injuring 130 more, told controllers he took the curve at around 190 kilometers per hour, despite an 80 kph speed limit. He survived the crash and is now under investigation by local authorities. Even if the driver turns out to have been responsible for speeding, rail passengers might wonder what else had to fail in the safety system to allow one man’s error to harm so many people....

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office. One such person is Bandy X....

Iqbal Arshad, one of Motorola’s top engineers, has become a little defensive since the launch of the much-anticipated Moto X last week, as some have criticized the device for not being innovative enough. The smartphone, which is the flagship device of the newly reinvigorated Motorola, is among the first devices to be introduced to the market since Motorola was acquired by Google a year ago. All about the Moto X...