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Engineers have developed a new way to separate chemicals that could drastically cut the energy required to make fuels or synthetic polymers. The process could cut the energy needed in separation stages in half and save $2 billion a year in energy costs in the United States and avert 45 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions around the world annually. Researchers designed a membrane that could distinguish between very closely related molecules and could survive in conditions that would cause existing membranes to fall apart, opening a whole new suite of applications....

(Adds color, storm preparations, updates power outages) By Curtis Skinner SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Heavy rain and high winds lashed northern and central California on Thursday, knocking out electricity to tens of thousands of homes in the San Francisco Bay area and prompting school closures across the region as a major storm moved in from the Pacific. Winds howled through Sacramento, the state capital, with gale-force gusts rattling buildings and whipping through trees before dawn, followed by heavy downpours just as the morning commute was getting started....

Fifteen years ago, a young boy in Bloomington, Indiana, was frequently sick with respiratory problems and other ailments. His symptoms appeared suddenly, and were so severe that he visited his doctor monthly and missed many school days. His mother began to suspect that something in his elementary school classroom was the culprit. School officials discovered that pesticides had been sprayed on the school grounds and inside the boy’s classroom the day before his latest illness....

Every October the deluge of pink, from NFL players’ gloves to yogurt lids, is hard to ignore. All of these items aim to raise awareness or money for breast cancer research. But what about the fellows? Some men do get breast cancer, but it is primarily a women’s health issue. So a few years ago, a group of gents decided to celebrate “Movember,” a month (following October) in which they would grow spectacular moustaches to help raise money for prostate and testicular cancer research....

By Geoff BrumfielFor a brief time in Portland, Oregon, this past spring, thousands of physicists moved from session to session at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) on the lookout for the next big thing.It was a talent search not unlike the one that unfolds every night in the bars and converted dance halls of Portland’s famous music scene, where locals listen for the next big sound....

A radiation leak has raised questions about the safety of the United States’ only deep nuclear-waste repository, and has given fresh voice to scientists calling for more research into underground waste storage. On 14 February, radioactive plutonium and americium leaked out of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, where thousands of drums of contaminated material from the US nuclear-weapons program are stored in salt beds more than half a kilometer below the surface....

Two years ago, planetary scientists reported the discovery of a large saltwater lake under the ice at Mars’s south pole, a finding that was met with excitement and some scepticism. Now, researchers say they’ve confirmed the presence of that lake—and found three more. The discovery, reported on 28 September in Nature Astronomy, was made using radar data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. It follows the detection of a single subsurface lake in the same region in 2018—which, if confirmed, would be the first body of liquid water ever detected on the red planet and a possible habitat for life....

Novels may be made up, but the emotions they evoke are real. These feelings grow out of our connection to the novel’s characters and the relationships between a protagonist and others in the context of the broader society. As we follow the ups and downs of a carefully crafted story, we build connections within the social and emotional regions of the brain. The result, according to recent research, is a better understanding of other human beings and a deeper empathy for others, leading to improved social skills....

In 1990 David Lewis, a Vancouver man living with HIV, went to a local newspaper and announced that he had assisted eight friends, all suffering from AIDS, in committing suicide–an act of murder in the eyes of Canadian law. For many people, the news simply affirmed what they had long suspected was happening in the AIDS community. But to Russel Ogden, a criminology graduate student at Simon Fraser University looking for a research project, it was an opportunity to go where no scientist had ventured before....

Alaska’s appetite for oil is as ubiquitous as the state’s proliferating examples of a changing climate. The Arctic is melting faster than anywhere else in the world. Permafrost is thawing and releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Warmer air and ocean water have diminished sea ice. Native villages along the coast are moving inland to flee rising seas. But climate change is a political issue. Although Alaskans may not dispute the science, they do disagree about what to do about it....

A new study examining the efficacy of paying to preserve forests finds that carbon offsets do produce genuine emissions reductions. The study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment by three Stanford University researchers, examines California’s carbon offset program. It allows businesses to fund forest preservation in lieu of turning in some of their allowances under the state’s cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases. The market currently lets businesses use offsets for up to 8 percent of their total emissions under the cap, although that percentage is set to decrease after 2020 under the cap-and-trade extension bill, A....

Zoo elephants live much shorter lives than their wild counterparts, according to a study based on some 4,500 elephants in European zoos and wildlife refuges. Infant mortality runs higher in captives, too—especially among Asian pachyderms, which suggests that something during gestation or early infancy raises the risk for the zoo-born. The data, however, may not reflect the latest zoo practices, which are more animal-friendly. Median life span in years: In zoos In the wild African elephants 16....

The nearest alien planet to Earth may not be an only child. Astronomers have spotted a dusty ring around the nearby star Proxima Centauri, hinting at the existence of other planets in addition to the famous Proxima b, a new study reports. “This result suggests that Proxima Centauri may have a multiple-planet system with a rich history of interactions that resulted in the formation of a dust belt,” study lead author Guillem Anglada, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia in Spain, said in a statement....

A medieval parchment from a monastery in Egypt has yielded a surprising treasure. Hidden beneath Christian texts, scholars have discovered what seems to be part of the long-lost star catalogue of the astronomer Hipparchus—believed to be the earliest known attempt to map the entire sky. Scholars have been searching for Hipparchus’s catalogue for centuries. James Evans, a historian of astronomy at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, describes the find as “rare” and “remarkable”....

Renowned geneticist Francis Collins has announced that he will step down as director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) at the end of the year. “This is the right time, it’s the right message, it’s the right decision,” says Collins, who has led the US$41-billlion biomedical agency through a historic and deadly pandemic. Picked for the job by former president Barack Obama in 2009, Collins has had the role for longer than any other presidential appointee and served under three administrations....

Almost as soon as James was born in April 2003, it was clear that he was not well. When he failed a newborn screening test and was struggling to breathe, he was sent straight from the delivery room to the neonatal intensive care unit. Doctors there suspected he had a genetic condition, but genetic testing, such as it was 15 years ago, yielded no answers. So nine days later, James’ mother, Angela, took him home....

From Nature magazine D-Wave, the small company that sells the world’s only commercial quantum computer, has just bagged an impressive new customer: a collaboration between Google, NASA and the non-profit Universities Space Research Association. The three organizations have joined forces to install a D-Wave Two, the computer company’s latest model, in a facility launched by the collaboration — the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California....

A mere 2 hours before his grisly murder about 5,300 years ago, Ötzi the iceman chowed down on some mouthwatering morsels: wild meat from ibex and red deer, cereals from einkorn wheat and—oddly enough—poisonous fern, a new study finds. It’s unclear why Ötzi ate the toxic fern, known as bracken (Pteridium aquilinum). But it’s possible that he used the fern to wrap his food, almost like a piece of plastic wrap, and then unintentionally ingested some of the toxic spores the fern left behind, said study co-senior researcher Albert Zink, head of the Eurac Research Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy....

A sweeping new analysis adds to the evidence that many women who take hormone therapy during menopause are more likely to develop breast cancer—and remain at higher risk of cancer for more than a decade after they stop taking the drugs. The study, published Thursday in the Lancet, looked at data from dozens of studies, including long-term data on more than 100,000 women who developed breast cancer after menopause. Half of those women had used what’s known as menopausal hormone therapy, or MHT....

Before the tearing, the choking and the pouring mucus, tear gas burns. It causes searing pain in the eyes, skin, lungs and mouth—or anywhere it touches. “It can be overwhelming and incapacitating. You can be forced to shut your eyes and cannot open them,” says Sven-Eric Jordt, an anesthesiologist at Duke University. And then comes the coughing and the nausea and the vomiting. What causes these chemicals to have such devastating effects on the human body?...