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The United States is likely to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 16.3 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, falling just shy of the 17 percent target pledged by President Obama at the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to a new study. “With the failure to pass comprehensive climate legislation in the 2010-2011 Congress, most analysts in the U.S. and internationally would have concluded that the U.S. is doing nothing to meet its Copenhagen pledge,” said Dallas Burtraw, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future (RFF) and lead author of the report....

More likely than not, you have had to deal with someone who just seemed a little “off” at some point in your life. Maybe a frustrating coworker who makes everyone’s lives miserable? Or an estranged family member who is often considered the “black sheep” that no one can really handle being around? Did you ever wonder if there was something actually wrong with that person, but you just couldn’t quite pinpoint what it was?...

The Age of Digital Entanglement By Danny Hillis On November 19, 2009, a single circuit board inside a computer router in Salt Lake City failed. The glitch cascaded, preventing air traffic control computers nationwide from communicating. Hundreds of flights were canceled. On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones industrial average inexplicably plummeted almost 1,000 points in minutes, only to mysteriously rise before the day ended. Had the “flash crash” not reversed itself, a global financial meltdown would have ensued....

My Mom stockpiles lightbulbs. One closet houses neatly stacked cardboard boxes of 60-watt and 100-watt bulbs, arranged by wattage and ready for use the moment an old bulb flickers. She orders them online, with each shipment adding to her supply. My parents don’t fear the apocalypse; they fear a world without incandescent bulbs, the energy-inefficient globes that people think are going lights-out starting January 1 under federal law. Consumers are correct that conventional incandescent lightbulbs, which fail to meet new energy-efficiency standards, can no longer be legally manufactured or imported into the country....

In mid-August the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Transportation Security Administration announced Metro has paid $100,000 each for several TSA-approved portable terahertz millimeter-wave screening devices. Made by the U.K.-based company ThruVision, the devices will be deployed within the city’s metro rail system to detect at a distance weapons capable of causing mass casualties. The reality of mass screening in a public-transit system immediately stirred a sense of unease....

Men and women can now thank a dozen brain regions for their romantic fervor. Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neuro­transmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure. Conversely, psychiatrists might someday help individuals who become dan­gerously depressed after a heartbreak by adjusting those chemicals....

Asian elephants reassure other distressed elephants by touching them and “talking” to them, which suggests they are capable of empathy and reassurance, according to new research. “There is 50 years of behavioral observational research out of Africa that elephants are highly social, they have empathy and they can think about their social relationships and make specific social decisions that impact themselves and others,” said study researcher Josh Plotnik, of the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom....

When Daniel Griffin first heard media reports earlier in the fall that California’s drought was the worst in the past few centuries, he didn’t quite buy it. Griffin, an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Society at the University of Minnesota, had a decade of experience studying paleoclimate and environmental science using tree-ring data. From his research on blue oak trees, he knew that periods without a lot of precipitation weren’t that uncommon in the state’s history....

Until now, attempts at treating autism have been limited to drugs that target peripheral symptoms such as anxiety, aggression and repetitive behaviors. But researchers hope that data from a crop of new drugs in development will allow them, for the first time, to treat an underlying mechanism of the condition, potentially helping those with autism to communicate. The majority of autism cases are idiopathic, meaning that researchers have yet to understand their cause....

Canned albacore tuna purchased by U.S. schools contains more mercury than what government officials have reported, raising the risks for some tuna-loving kids, according to a new study from a coalition of advocacy groups. Children who eat two medium servings of albacore, or white, tuna per week could be exposed to as much as six times the dose that federal guidelines consider safe, according to the report prepared for the Mercury Policy Project....

Gone are the days of riding in the family station wagon, inhaling smelly, sooty fumes from a noisy diesel engine. Diesel engines have always been more efficient than their gasoline counterparts, but over the last decade, the autos and the fuel they run on have had to come a long way to shed their dirty image. Today, diesel cars offer Americans another fuel-efficient vehicle option that could also ease the pain at the pump....

There may be a new way to take the oceans’ temperature: using sound. Like the atmosphere, they are warming because of climate change, and they have absorbed about 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. This alteration contributes to sea-level rise, imperils marine species and influences weather patterns. But tracking the warming is tricky. Ship-based observations capture only snapshots in time over a minuscule portion of the seas....

The forward momentum of medical progress is manifest, it could be argued, in the $50 billion spent in 2008 on pharmaceutical research and development in the quest to bring new drugs to market. But little scientific or governmental infrastructure exists to ensure that each new treatment is actually an improvement over existing therapies—and to tease out what therapies are best for which patients. People facing tough medical decisions, such as cancer patients, often have to work with their doctors to decide what combination of surgery, chemotherapies, radiation, lifestyle changes or other treatments will likely be the most effective choice....

Mountains have evoked awe and inspired artists and adventurers throughout human existence. Recent research has led to important new insights into how these most magnificent of Earths formations came to be. Mountains are created and shaped, it appears, not only by the movements of the vast tectonic plates that make up Earths exterior but also by climate and erosion. In particular, the interactions between tectonic, climatic and erosional processes exert strong control over the shape and maximum height of mountains as well as the amount of time necessary to build–or destroy–a mountain range....

Cindy Hale, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota, answers e-mails from a lot of distraught citizens of the Great Lakes region. The residents, it seems, have introduced certain earthworms into their gardens, she says, “and now they’ve got that ‘nothing grows here syndrome.’” Long considered a gardener’s friend, earthworms can loosen and aerate the soil. But the story is different in the Great Lakes region. The last Ice Age wiped out native earthworms 10,000 years ago, and ever since the Northeast forest has evolved without the crawlers, Hale says....

“Emoclew dna olleh,” Columbia University string theorist Brian Greene said as he opened a conference at the New York Academy of Sciences last October. “If you understood that as ‘Hello and welcome’ in time reverse,” he clarified, “you probably don’t need to be here.” No one left. Many of the world’s top theoretical physicists and cosmologists gathered at the conference to grapple with the mystery of how time works. New telescope observations and novel thinking about quantum gravity have convinced them that it is time to reexamine time....

We now know what to call the mysterious object from interstellar space that zoomed past Earth last month. The interloper—the first known interstellar body observed within our own solar system—has been named ‘Oumuamua, which means “a messenger from afar arriving first” in Hawaiian, representatives of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced yesterday (Nov. 14). The IAU also approved an official scientific designation for ‘Oumuamua: 1I/2017 U1. This is a first-of-its-kind moniker; the “I” stands for “interstellar....

The article “A Quantum Threat to Special Relativity” by David Z Albert and Rivka Galchen discusses how the quantum phenomenon of entanglement overturns our intuition that the world is “local”. That is, we can directly affect only objects we can touch, and indirect effects must be transmitted by means of a chain of events that each act locally. The great physicists Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein clashed over the implications of apparent nonlocalities in quantum mechanics, but neither imagined the universe could actually be nonlocal....

By Kathryn Doyle (Reuters Health) - A new study of Head Start pre-schoolers in Michigan found that those who were underweight or overweight at the start of the program entered kindergarten at a healthier weight than similar kids in the community. Kids in Head Start seem to benefit socially and emotionally, and may also benefit physically, the authors write in the new study. “I’m a pediatrician and in my experience seeing kids in clinic in a low income setting, the kids would enroll in Head Start and I was watching their weight get better,” said lead author Dr....

The earth harbors about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that water comes from the sea and is not potable unless treated by expensive, energy-hungry desalination plants. Those problems stem largely from inefficiency in the way salt ions are separated from water molecules, and the solution, says a team of materials scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lies in fundamentally revising that process. The predominant desalination method today—reverse osmosis (RO)—relies on polymer-based membranes to remove salt and requires great pressure to push water through a semipermeable film....