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Fossil fuel-producing nations are on track to blow by their Paris Agreement pledges by developing coal, oil and natural gas through 2030 at levels that would fail to avoid dangerous temperature increases, according to new research. The so-called production gap between planned fossil fuel output and the goal of stopping temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius would grow for at least 20 years without stronger climate policies, said a report by leading research organizations and the United Nations Environment Programme....

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - A baby gorilla born in a rare Caesarian section at the San Diego Zoo last week has pneumonia and was treated for a collapsed lung, officials said on Tuesday. The 17th gorilla delivered at the Southern California zoo developed the illness, an inflammation of the lungs with congestion, around the time of her birth, according to a statement from the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. “We’ve been working with the baby all weekend and after having several days of experience treating her, it’s pretty obvious that we’ve been dealing with pneumonia,” Nadine Lamberski, associate director of veterinary services at the park, said in a statement....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. In June 2017, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft announced the formation of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). The aim of this industry-led initiative is to disrupt the terrorist exploitation of its services. Recently, GIFCT members hailed the achievements of its first year of operations. But, while this progress must be acknowledged, significant challenges remain....

Electric vehicles have long been a promising option for sustainable transportation. They come with practical headaches like expensive, bulky batteries that often need recharging, however. Israel is tackling those hurdles by investing in roads that power electric buses—as they ride down the street. The government is collaborating with Israeli start-up ElectRoad to install a public bus route in Tel Aviv, using an under-the-pavement wireless technology that eliminates the need for plug-in recharging stations....

Sitting by his laptop on the Mission Bay campus, Orion Weiner of the University of California, San Francisco, is watching a movie of an immune cell called a neutrophil scurrying across his computer screen. The movie, made with a conventional optical microscope, reveals that a fuzzy vanguard of proteins is driving the neutrophil. But when he opens a second movie file of the motion, this one made with a more advanced light microscopy technique called total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF), the vanguard no longer appears as one solid front of proteins but rather as a wave of individual proteins pushing forward like ripples from a pebble in a pond....

Mars, once thought to be a static, dusty landscape, is ever changing. It wasn’t until NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) showed up that we observed shifting dunes, seasons coming and going, and dust devils swirling across the planet. The spacecraft recently marked its 15th anniversary in orbit around our neighboring world, where it has used a suite of four science instruments and three cameras to catalogue a diverse array of geologic features....

Today we are at an exciting threshold of biology. Advances in DNA sequencing, coupled with high-end computation, are opening a frontier in new knowledge. Obtaining genetic information and obtaining insight from it have never been cheaper. The potential for curing previously incurable diseases, including chronic ones, seems immense. If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking that you heard it 15 years ago, when the Human Genome Project was in full swing....

Hard on the heels of discovering what could be a massive impact crater deep under the Greenland ice sheet, scientists think they may have discovered a second, unrelated such structure nearby. The new suspected impact crater is about 22 miles (36 kilometers) wide and, like the first structure, has not yet been definitively identified as an impact crater. There are many more crater-shaped features on Earth than there are actual craters formed by meteorites slamming into the planet....

Photovoltaic cells can generate electricity without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, but solar power is significantly more expensive than the electricity produced by coal- and gas-fired plants. To boost the competitiveness of solar energy, researchers have striven to make solar cells convert sunlight into electricity more efficiently. Inspiration may come from the most basic scientific research. Investigators are starting to delve into the intricacies of photosynthesis, which converts sunlight into chemical energy with almost 100 percent efficiency....

When surveyed, most people say they get tattoos or unconventional piercings to express individuality. But could something more psychologically primal be afoot? Researchers at the University of Wroclaw in Poland measured about 200 men and women—half of them inked or pierced in places other than their earlobes—for body symmetry, or how similar their right and left sides are. (More similarity indicates genetic health and is associated with sexual attractiveness.) Among the research subjects, men with bodily decorations exhibited greater symmetry than those without, whereas no differences emerged in women....

DOROTHY, W. Va. – Larry Gibson lives on an island in the sky. It didn’t start that way: His land was once a low hill in a rugged hardwood forest – cherry, oak, hickory – skipping from ridge to ridge across one of the poorest, most rural areas of the Lower 48. Then came the mining companies with their dynamite and trucks. They clear-cut the forest, blew the tops off the ridges and scraped the rocks into the hollows, pushing hundreds of feet of mountains into the valleys below....

A rare total solar eclipse dimmed the skies above a small swath of the top of the world today (March 20), creating an incredible sight on the first day of spring for skywatchers lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time to see it. Photos of the total solar eclipse of 2015 show the darkened sun as the moon blocked out its light as seen from the Earth....

U.S. EPA is delaying the final rollout of its new rules aimed at lowering the power sector’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030. And while the agency insists the two delays – one a matter of months, the other a matter of weeks – are aimed at helping states develop compliance plans, observers say the moves could help shield the efforts from legal and congressional challenges. Yesterday afternoon’s announcement concerned three different sets of proposed power plant rules: language aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions in new, existing and modified power plants....

Last fall an unexpected out-of-towner blazed a faint but memorable trail through the solar system. ‘Oumuamua, as it came to be called, had dive-bombed the sun from parts unknown, and was witnessed whizzing past Earth on an orbital path that would take it back out to interstellar space. That offered astronomers a brief, first-ever chance to study an object from another star. As a singular event, ‘Oumuamua was gratifyingly weird: likely made of rock or metal, reddish in color, not gassy like a comet and stretched into an extremely elongated shape....

China’s legal trade has been linked to the illegal trade in ivory, which has driven a surge in poaching in Africa. So conservation groups have hailed Zhao’s statement as a potential game changer. Nature asks what these controls will actually achieve. Is there now a ban on the ivory trade in China? It is not clear cut. Zhao said in his announcement: “We will strictly control ivory processing and trade until the commercial processing and sale of ivory and its products are eventually halted....

From Nature magazine Sabra Klein came to the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction this week armed with a message that might seem obvious to scientists who obsess over sex: men and women are different. But it is a fact often overlooked by health researchers, says Klein, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Her research on influenza viruses in mice, presented at the meeting in Montreal, Canada, helps explain why women are more susceptible to death and disease from infectious pathogens — and the reason is intimately linked with reproduction....

From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. November 29, 2021—It’s no secret that the diversity of life around us is plummeting fast. In 2020 alone, scientists declared more than 100 species to be extinct. And that’s bad news not only for the creatures themselves, but for those of us (that would be all of us) who rely on them for food, to produce oxygen, to hold soil in place, to cleanse water, to beautify our world and so much more....

Key concepts Physics Simple machines Wedges Air pressure Introduction Looking for a cool and surprising project to show to your friends? Give this activity a stab! Take a potato and a straw—maybe a pencil as well—and challenge your friends to drill holes into the potato with the least amount of effort. Chances are, they will not find a method that gets the job done with ease. The best method—one that requires the least effort from you—will surprise everyone!...

With a five-meter-wide, 57-meter-tall rocket waiting to blast off from China’s southern island of Hainan, the nation is quietly making final preparations for its first independent trip to Mars. When the launch window opens in mid-July, Chinese scientists will strive to send a probe to a planet that confused their ancestors with its constantly changing brightness and position in the sky. The spacecraft, called Tianwen-1, or the “Quest for Heavenly Truth,” will carry 13 scientific instruments to examine the Red Planet from orbit and on its surface....

Air-conditioning accounts for nearly 15 percent of building energy use in the U.S. today. The number of days with record heat could soar in the coming decades. These two facts present a difficult problem: In a warming world, how can we cool our homes and workplaces while reducing energy use? Researchers at Stanford University say part of the solution is a material that sucks heat from sun-drenched buildings and radiates it into outer space....