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One of the Obama administration’s climate goals is for 30 percent of America’s electricity to be generated using solar energy by 2050. That is likely to include the installation of solar panels on the roofs of millions of American homes in the coming decades. But as falling solar panel prices and concerns about the climate spur a rush to install rooftop solar in many states, some utilities have begun charging a variety of complicated fees that are leading to a chilling effect on the home solar power markets in those regions....

Researchers have discovered early blood markers in people genetically predisposed to develop Huntington’s disease, a mysterious neurodegenerative disorder. These signs may provide future targets for staving off or even preventing symptoms from developing. Huntington’s disease, which affects an estimated 30,000 Americans, kills neurons (nerve cells), which leads to cognitive difficulties, a loss of movement control and emotional distress. A carrier typically does not experience symptoms until he or she is in her 30s or 40s, and lives an average of 15 to 20 years once they show up....

Incapacitating light beam: The suspect is going for his gun, and the police officer doesn’t want to shoot. The founders of a company called Genesis Illumination hope police officers will soon be reaching for a StunRay instead of a gun or Taser. They claim their newly patented device can render an assailant helpless with a brief flash of high-intensity light. It works by overloading the neural networks connected to the retina, saturating the target’s world in a blinding pool of white light....

Key concepts Chemistry Temperature Solid Liquid Freezing point Introduction Have you ever wondered why ice cubes in your cold drink become gradually smaller or why their surface becomes smoother as they melt? Does ice always melt this way? In this activity you will use water balloons to create giant ice balls and observe how they melt. Can you predict the effect a bit of salt will have on your giant ice ball?...

OCTOBER 12 Face your fears at Goose Bumps! The Science of Fear, a traveling exhibition developed by the California Science Center. Kids can experience the scary emotion in a safe environment as they learn how their brain and body work together to confront danger. Visit Boston’s Museum of Science to get your heart pumping in hands-on activities, including an interactive video game where the player learns how fear helps animals survive in nature....

Inventors have struggled for years to create displays that can conjure vivid three-dimensional images that users can manipulate and interact with. Chemists could exploit such marvels to design new drug molecules. Oil and gas explorers could see exactly where to aim their drills. Surgeons could pass probes or radiation beams through the collated slices of diagnostic data produced by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computed tomography (CT) machines to test procedures before performing an operation....

Editor’s Note (7/22/20): The study this story was based on has been retracted because a new unpublished specimen casts doubts on the researchers’ hypothesis regarding the phylogenetic position of the fossil they described. The word “dinosaurs” conjures up images of fierce and enormous reptiles. But not all of the “terrible lizards” were huge. Part of their success rested on the fact that they came in all shapes and sizes. And now paleontologists have revealed what may be the smallest dinosaur of all time....

Have you ever wondered if people in the same academic major are similar somehow? Or likewise, have you ever wondered if people in different majors are different somehow? My guess is that you have. Whether emanating from cheerful conversations with peers, or from Hollywood’s entertaining caricatures, many of us have this sense that there seem to be different “types” in different academic majors. Is there some truth to this? The short answer is yes....

On August 1, 1966, the day psychiatrist Stuart Brown started his assistant professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 25-year-old Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower on the Austin campus and shot 46 people. Whitman, an engineering student and a former U.S. Marine sharpshooter, was the last person anyone expected to go on a killing spree. After Brown was assigned as the state’s consulting psychiatrist to investigate the incident and later, when he interviewed 26 convicted Texas murderers for a pilot study, he discovered that most of the killers, including Whitman, shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids....

The standard reference guide for psychiatrists—the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-IV)—classifies geophagia as a subtype of pica, an eating disorder in which people consume things that are not food, such as cigarette ash and paint chips. But as the students would learn, studies of animals and human cultures suggest that geophagia is not necessarily abnormal—in fact, it may well be adaptive. Researchers are taking another look at dirt eating and discovering that the behavior often provides people and animals with vital minerals and inactivates toxins from food and the environment....

Along the shores of the Dead Sea, the solidity of the ground underfoot cannot be taken for granted. In recent years sinkholes, up to 20 meters in depth, have been cropping up at a rapid clip. The collapses have rendered a recreation area unusable and have reportedly trapped a handful of people who required rescue. To get ahead of the problem, a team of scientists identified the signs of an emerging sinkhole from subtle elevation changes in soil....

The earth is full of locales seemingly inhospitable to life. In areas like that deep beneath the ocean’s mud floor, oxygen cannot penetrate. In such anoxic environments, the simple cellular precursors of all life–bacteria and archea–thrive, but the single-celled ancestors of more complex life-forms, known as eukaryotes, were thought to suffocate. Now new research has shown that at least one eukaryotic species–a shelled, amoebalike creature called a foraminifer–can prosper without oxygen by respiring nitrogen instead....

When Sima Qian, prefect grand scribe astrologer of China’s early Han dynasty, gazed up at the constellation of Orion a little more than 2,000 years ago, he didn’t see the brilliant crimson star on the hunter’s right shoulder that we know today as Betelgeuse. According to an astronomical treatise he compiled, at the time, Orion’s shoulder was instead marked by a yellow star. If Sima Qian’s observations were correct, they suggest astronomers from antiquity had serendipitously witnessed Betelgeuse during a profound astrophysical transformation—one that has important implications for the star’s evolution and eventual demise....

Kids under five years old have just become the last age group made eligible for a COVID vaccine in the U.S. A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee voted 21 to 0 in favor of authorizing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for children aged six months through four years and authorizing the Moderna vaccine for those aged six months through five years. The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee’s decision reflects a consensus among the panel’s health experts that the vaccines’ benefits outweigh the risks for the littlest children....

Dear EarthTalk: Is the “Draize Test” using live animals still used to test cosmetics? – Jim M., Bridgeport, CT The Draize Test was devised back in 1944 by U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) toxicologist John H. Draize to evaluate the risks of normal short-term exposure to new cosmetics and other personal care products. Still used today by some companies, the test involves applying a small amount of the substance under study to an animal’s eye or skin for several hours, and then observing whether or not irritation occurs over the following week or two....

IMAGINE an eight-year-old boy whom we will call Eric. He is irritable and talks incessantly. Unable to sit still and concentrate, he does poorly at school. Nevertheless, he claims to be one of the smartest kids in the world and blames his poor academic performance on his “horrible” teachers. There are periods when his mood changes abruptly from euphoria to depression and then swings back again. Eric’s symptoms qualify him for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which is characterized by episodes of full-blown mania or a less severe form called hypomania....

U.S. EPA officials writing rules for implementing the expanded national biofuels mandate said yesterday that they are open to changing methods for measuring biofuels’ greenhouse gas emissions and plan to seek outside review of the matter. But the agency has not bowed to industry pressure to withhold language on a key issue: measuring the emissions from “indirect” land-use changes stemming from increased cultivation of crops used in fuel production. The 2007 energy law expanded the national renewable fuels standard to 36 billion gallons by 2022 and requires that growing volumes—ultimately reaching 21 billion gallons—come from next-generation biofuels such as cellulosic ethanol....

A lifetime is very long relative to the picosecond it takes for two atoms to form a molecule, but it is the blink of an eye compared to many natural phenomena, from the rise of mountain chains to the collisions of galaxies. To answer questions that take more than a lifetime to resolve, scientists hand their efforts down from one generation to the next. In medical science, for example, longitudinal studies often follow subjects well after the original researchers have passed; some studies that are still ongoing started as far back as the 1920s....

Many machines can recognize humans by their fingerprints or facial features. These biometric traits are not the only ones that set individuals apart, however. Each person’s walking gait is unique—and it can serve not only as an identifier but also as an indicator of mood and health. A team of researchers has developed remote sensors that analyze footsteps by measuring tiny floor vibrations. They used this technology to identify specific individuals walking through a building and to test a new method of hands-off wellness monitoring....

For more than 100 years, the wreck of the lost ship Endurance has sat untouched at the bottom of the icy Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica. Famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew were the last humans to lay eyes on it before its demise in 1915, watching helplessly as shifting sea ice slowly crushed their ill-fated vessel and sent it sinking 10,000 feet down to the ocean floor....