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The Rocks Don’t Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah’s Flood by David R. Montgomery W. W. Norton, 2012 ($26.95) This thought-provoking book explores the interplay between science and mythical tales of great floods. Montgomery, a University of Washington geomorphologist and MacArthur fellow, digs into the evidence for Noah’s flood, among other legendary deluges, and finds that it may refer to the formation of the Black Sea some 8,000 years ago. In that catastrophic event, rapid sea-level rise caused the Mediterranean to overflow into what was then a low-lying freshwater lake, inundating some of the earliest farming communities....

Editor’s note: This article is the first of two addressing the problems posed by aging electronic devices entering the waste stream. See also, Laws Fail to Keep up with Mounting E-Trash With the holiday season officially upon us, the hunt is on for the hottest cell phones, flat-screen plasma TVs and video game systems. This seasonal new tech surge will no doubt please gadget lovers, but it will also result in a heap of old electronic devices being dumped into a waste stream already awash in refuse laden with cadmium, lead, mercury and other toxins....

Jaguars, which once roamed much of the southern U.S. but are now endangered—if not extinct—here, were slated to get a new so-called critical habitat to encourage their repatriation. But the big cats might have to wait south of the border a little bit longer. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), which is responsible for establishing habitats for endangered animals, had promised to announce a designated area for jaguars (Panthera onca) by January 2011—after being sued by the nonprofit groups Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and Defenders of Wildlife....

Waits in long lines. A shortage of testing. People scrambling to refresh websites for vaccine appointments. But this time, it’s not COVID—it’s monkeypox. The number of confirmed monkeypox cases in the U.S. had reached 1,053 as of July 13, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some experts say that number is likely a serious underestimate, however. “The scale of testing is very low—lower than would allow us to really make inferences about the dynamics of the epidemic, besides the idea that it’s an expanding epidemic,” says Keletso Makofane, a social network epidemiologist at Harvard University’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights....

CLIMATEWIRE | Dozens of countries rallied around phasing out fossil fuel financing during global climate negotiations seven months ago. Yesterday, those efforts were weakened by the world’s most powerful economies. The shift illustrates how the fear of losing access to energy imports — due to Russia’s war against Ukraine — is testing the commitment of countries that have been among the most vocal advocates of curbing climate change. Leaders of the Group of Seven nations — the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, France and Japan — agreed to support public investments in the natural gas sector “as a temporary response" to the abrupt shortfall in global gas supplies created by the pariah status of Russian fossil fuels....

Americans spend more on health care than people in any other nation. Yet in any given year, the piecemeal nature of the American medical insurance system causes many preventable deaths and unnecessary costs. Not surprisingly, COVID only exacerbated this already dire public health issue, as evidenced by the U.S.’s elevated mortality, compared with that of other high-income countries. A recent study quantified the severity of the impact of the pandemic on Americans who did not have access to health insurance....

Last year was the hottest on record by a wide margin, with temperatures creeping close to a ceiling set by almost 200 nations for limiting global warming, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said on Thursday. The data are the first of the New Year to confirm many projections that 2016 will exceed 2015 as the warmest since reliable records began in the 19th century, it said in a report....

A seven-million-year-old skull found in the Djurab Desert in Chad may indeed represent the earliest known member of the human family. Researchers unveiled the specimen back in 2002, assigned it to a new species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis (nickname: Toumaï), and said it was very close to the point at which the human lineage diverged from that of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. Critics, however, countered that the skull was probably an ape’s instead of that of a hominin (a creature on the line leading to us), given its primitive features....

Scientists have long thought that aging could be caused by molecular damage that accumulates in our bodies over the course of time. The damage is an unavoidable by-product of breathing oxygen and other metabolic processes that are necessary to life. Eventually, damaged cells stop working, or worse, adopt new functions that trigger cancerous growth or degrade important tissues in the brain, skin and other organs. But as Melinda Wenner Moyer reports in the February issue of Scientific American, investigators have conducted several experiments over the past few years that challenge this so-called oxidative stress theory of aging....

CONCORD, N.H. – Sen. Bernie Sanders sailed to an overwhelming victory in the New Hampshire Democratic primary last night, delivering a stinging blow to Hillary Clinton and promising to prolong the surprisingly tight nominating contest. Sanders vowed in a triumphant speech in a packed high school here to reform the “oligarchy” caused by Wall Street excess and to attack climate change by severely limiting the use of fossil fuels. “It is already causing devastating problems in this country and around the world,” he said of rising temperatures....

A water disinfection facility now under construction 30 miles north of Manhattan will use ultraviolet (UV) light to destroy waterborne pathogens in the reservoir pipes there that serve the Big Apple. New York City currently applies chlorine to kill waterborne organisms such as E. coli, Giardia and Cryptosporidium. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has for a decade urged communities to cut back on the chemical as much as possible. The UV facility, scheduled to turn on in 2012, is expected to be the world’s biggest....

Dear EarthTalk: Can earthquake energy be harnessed for power, particularly in places like Japan? Also, how can Japan, so vulnerable to earthquakes, even have nuclear power? – Sasha M., Australia While it is no doubt theoretically possible to generate electricity by harnessing the kinetic energy of shifting tectonic plates below the Earth’s crust, pulling it off from a practical standpoint would be a real logistical challenge—not to mention prohibitively expensive compared to harnessing other forms of energy, renewable or otherwise....

By Barbara Liston ORLANDO (Reuters) - Most people entering crocodile territory keep a wary eye out on water and land, but research suggests they need to look up. Though the reptiles lack obvious physical features to suggest this is possible, crocodiles in fact climb trees all the way to the crowns, according to University of Tennessee researcher Vladimir Dinets. Researchers in the climbing study observed crocodiles in Australia, Africa and North America....

Editor’s Note: Excerpted with permission from Imagine There’s No Heaven: How Atheism Helped Create the Modern World, by Mitchell Stephens. Available from Palgrave Macmillan. Copyright © 2014. Science’s contributions to the spread of disbelief is the least controversial segment of the virtuous cycle for which I am arguing in seventeenth-century Europe. For science’s methods are clearly troublesome for religion. The devout, to begin with, are not wont to view their precepts merely as propositions to be controverted or confirmed....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Have you had the experience of looking at some product online and then seeing ads for it all over your social media feed? Far from coincidence, these instances of eerily accurate advertising provide glimpses into the behind-the-scenes mechanisms that feed an item you search for on Google, “like” on social media or come across while browsing into custom advertising on social media....

An observatory buried deep in Antarctic ice has reported the results of its search for an hypothesized particle called the ‘sterile neutrino’: a total blank. The null result, reported on 8 August in Physical Review Letters, doesn’t spell the end of a decades-long search to find the subatomic particle, which—if found—would upend the standard picture of particle physics. But it is the strongest evidence so far that the sterile neutrino doesn’t exist at the mass range that physicists had hoped, based on anomalies from several experiments over the past three decades....

FASTBALLS FROM BLACK HOLES A network of 1,400 ground-based particle detectors and two dozen telescopes has located the possible origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays. Traveling at near light speed, these rays—most likely protons—pack 1020 electron volts, 100 million times the energy produced by the largest particle accelerators and roughly equivalent to that of a fast-pitch baseball. The source appears to be nearby active galactic nuclei: bright galactic cores probably powered by supermassive black holes....

A simple white napkin made from a specially designed polymer allows researchers to detect pathogens and other potential biohazards by wiping a surface or soaking up a spill. Nanofibers roughly 1/800th the size of a human hair made from polylactic acid (PLA)–a polymer derived from corn–have been studded with antibodies that serve as biological sensors. The napkin collects a pathogen and, hiding thousands of those biosensors in its tremendous internal surface area, efficiently exposes it to detection, according to new research presented by Margaret Frey of Cornell University at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco on September 11....

Elephants move their powerful trunks with precision and complexity, delicately picking up a single leaf as easily as they heft a log. But researchers have struggled to explain how, exactly, the trunks manage to do so. New research published in Current Biology reveals part of the answer, thanks to motion-capture technology typically used to make movies. “Elephants have evolved these amazing organs with an infinite number of degrees of freedom,” says lead author and University of Geneva biologist Michel Milinkovitch....

By Barbara Lewis and Foo Yun Chee BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Funding green energy will become harder under EU rules published on Wednesday designed to replace subsidies with market-based schemes, just when the Ukraine crisis has heightened the need for alternatives to imported fossil fuel. The executive European Commission said the guidelines, which will be gradually phased in, strike a necessary balance after fierce political debate about the cost of green subsidies....