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The long-term survival of coral reefs will depend on how well they can deal with rising ocean temperatures. Corals, the animals that famously build reefs, get most of their energy and color from microscopic algae that live inside their tissue. This unique arrangement is very sensitive to the surroundings, however. When the water gets too warm, the corals expel or consume the algae, and turn white. If the warm water persists, this “bleaching” process can starve corals to death....

In its June issue Scientific American published an essay stating emphatically that reanimating species such as woolly mammoths from surviving DNA is a bad idea. This dismissal is too hasty. The idea has merit and is worth discussing with an open mind—and with multidisciplinary viewpoints. The goal of reanimation research is not to make perfect living copies of extinct organisms, nor is it meant to be a one-off stunt in a laboratory or zoo....

Private universities will need to recognize graduate students who conduct research and help teach classes as employees and therefore accept the unions that they form, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday. In a 3-1 decision, the board ruled that undergraduate and graduate student assistants and research assistants are statutory employees and are therefore covered by the National Labor Relations Act. The decision opens the door for the students and research assistants at private universities to band together to negotiate issues like pay, benefits, workload, and class size....

During a rehearsal one day in 1842, Hungarian composer Franz Liszt was less than thrilled with the performance of the Weimar orchestra, which he directed. “Gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please!” he exclaimed, astounding the musicians. How on earth does one play bluer? Similar requests followed, according to a report in the musical periodical Neue Berliner Musikzeitung. Liszt demanded the orchestra not to go “so rose,” because the music was instead a “deep violet....

The United States hit a milestone in the fight against climate change in October 2018 when sales of electric vehicles passed the 1 million mark. But the achievement—though notable—is hardly cause for celebration. It’s taken years and plenty of government-backed incentives to convince enough U.S. consumers to buy 1 million electric vehicles. And while sales have increased recently, they still represent just a fraction of U.S. demand. Last year, sales of EVs accounted for about 2% of the American market....

With drillers tapping into massive stores of natural gas across the United States, scientists are researching ways to capture it more effectively. Natural gas mostly consists of methane but has smaller amounts of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and nitrogen in the mix. Energy companies are looking for a cheap way to separate these gases to yield a pure methane stream. Developers also want to control methane leaks because the gas is an especially potent heat trapper in the atmosphere....

‘Oumuamua—a mysterious, interstellar object that crashed through our solar system two years ago—might in fact be alien technology. That’s because an alternative, non-alien explanation might be fatally flawed, as a new study argues. But most scientists think the idea that we spotted alien technology in our solar system is a long shot. In 2018, our solar system ran into an object lost in interstellar space. The object, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, seemed to be long and thin—cigar-shaped—and tumbling end over end....

OSLO (Reuters) - Norway may introduce new measures to combat the levels of sea lice in the fish farming industry, Fisheries Minister Elisabeth Aspaker said on Thursday. “The situation for sea trout is worrying. A mild winter has given the lice good conditions for growth, and the fish farming industry faces a demanding summer season,” Aspaker said in a statement. “The industry takes this problem seriously but I will continuously consider the need for additional measures,” she said....

When you make a phone call or browse the internet, chances are a lot of the communication happens over fiber-optic links transmitting billions of bits every second. A recent experiment shows it may be possible to “twist” light waves, cram in more information than ever before, and send the signal over a practical distance. In this case, the physicists used twisted laser light to send the message “Hello World” between two islands....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Monte Kronio rises 1,300 feet above the geothermally active landscape of southwestern Sicily. Hidden in its bowels is a labyrinthine system of caves, filled with hot sulfuric vapors. At lower levels, these caves average 99 degrees Fahrenheit and 100 percent humidity. Human sweat cannot evaporate and heat stroke can result in less than 20 minutes of exposure to these underground conditions....

When, seconds after liftoff on October 28, an Antares rocket built by the Orbital Sciences Corp. fell back and exploded over its launch pad at a NASA facility in Wallops Island, Va., much more than its payload of small satellites and International Space Station cargo may have been lost. The rocket did not carry a crew, and no one was injured, but damage to the surrounding launch infrastructure was significant. A cursory inspection revealed shattered windows, imploded doors and broken equipment around the launch pad that will require extensive repairs....

Researchers from the University of Toronto have created a shoebox-sized laboratory that can do blood testing in remote, low-resource settings, quickly determining from a drop of blood whether a person has antibodies to specific infectious diseases. The device, which they called the MR Box—short for measles and rubella, the first diseases for which they tested—is still being fine-tuned. But their hope is that eventually it could be used to test for a variety of diseases, for both outbreak control and research purposes, in parts of the world where conventional lab support is hours—or farther—away, the scientists reported Wednesday....

The number of hungry people in the world remains stubbornly high. In 1960 roughly one billion people were undernourished; tonight about 800 million still will go to bed hungry. Yet the progress in filling empty bellies has been much more substantial than those two numbers might suggest, because today around 5.6 billion people are fed adequately, compared with only two billion half a century ago. Modern agricultural technology has been the key to these dramatic gains....

In 1978 the first spam e-mail–a plug from a marketing representative at Digital Equipment Corporation for the new Decsystem-20 computer–was dispatched to about 400 people on the Arpanet. Today junk correspondence in the form of unwanted commercial solicitations constitutes more than two thirds of all e-mail transmitted over the Internet, accounting for billions of messages every day. For a third of all e-mail users, about 80 percent of the messages received are spam....

Last spring, as the world was coming to grips with the frightening scale and contagion of the COVID pandemic, scientists started to make rapid progress in understanding the disease. For many discoveries, progress was aided by world-class supercomputers and data systems, and research results advanced with unprecedented efficiency—from understanding the structure of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to modeling its spread, from therapeutics to vaccines, from medical response to managing the virus’s impacts....

Severe storms “fall on the rich and poor alike,” but low-income neighborhoods suffer more damage from urban flooding, according to a new study. Poorer areas also have less political clout to remedy the many gaps in the way cities, states and the federal government deal with rising seas and more record rainfall caused by climate change. The report, released Friday by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, notes that the gaps include an underestimation of the historic damage caused by urban floods and the inability of governments to predict where damage will occur....

WE LOOK AT THE WORLD from two slightly different vantage points, which correspond to the positions of our two eyes. These dual vantage points create tiny differences between the two eyes’ images that are proportional to the relative depths of objects in the field of view. The brain can measure those differences, and when it does so the result is stereovision, or stereopsis. To get an idea of this effect, extend one arm to point at a distant object....

A team of solar scientists says it has improved on approaches that predict the eruption of solar flares, violent bursts of energy that can damage satellites, endanger astronauts in orbit and even threaten the power grid on the ground. Space agencies, airlines, satellite operators and power utilities would like to have access to better forecasts of all kinds of space weather—the charged particles and streams of radiation spewed out in irregular burps and blasts by the sun....

So much of our life is influenced by who is in our social networks: we rely on extended families, friends of friends of friends, co-workers and their connections to gain intelligence on everything from what books to read to how to vote to which jobs to pursue. But we are by no means alone in this reliance: social networks also affect the daily experiences and, indeed, survival of individuals in many animal species....

WHAT IS THE RELATION between selective attention and consciousness? When you strain to listen to the distant baying of coyotes over the sound of a campsite conversation, you do so by attending to the sound and becoming conscious of their howls. When you attend to your sparring opponent out of the corner of your eye, you become hyperaware of his smallest gestures. Because of the seemingly intimate relation between attention and consciousness, most scholars conflate the two processes....