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SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s capital, Beijing, infamous for its thick smog and heavy traffic, will slash the city’s new car sales quotas by almost 40 percent next year, as it looks to curb vehicle emissions and hazardous levels of pollution, the city government website said.The change in policy gives greater support for new, cleaner cars and could strengthen foreign carmakers’ determination to accelerate growth in China’s less crowded lower-tier cities.In the last month alone, high levels of pollution have forced China to all but shut down the northeastern city of Harbin, a major urban center with a population of 11 million....

Methane that leaks from fracking wells can be captured and converted into a chemical used in plastics manufacturing. New research from the University of Southern California has found that wasted methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that drives climate change, can be efficiently converted into a valuable new product. The study, published recently in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, found a more streamlined process for converting methane into basic chemicals used to manufacture plastics, agrochemicals and pharmaceuticals....

In a vast, unintentional public health experiment, millions of U.S. college students have descended on campuses to begin their fall semester with an unwelcome new arrival: the novel coronavirus. Severe COVID-19 outbreaks have already forced some campuses to close and move instruction online. Others have been fending off a surge in cases by relentlessly testing students and staff and isolating anyone whose results are positive. In order to safely reopen, institutions of higher learning need the capacity to conduct a massive amount of coronavirus tests and get results back quickly....

Humanity has been growing wheat as a staple crop for thousands of years, and we currently grow 620 million tons of the grain annually. During that span, however, its nutrition has largely not improved; in fact, it may have declined. But by returning to wheat’s wild roots, researchers have found a gene that will boost the grain’s nutritional value by speeding up its life span. Wheat breeder Jorge Dubcovsky of the University of California, Davis, led an international team that discovered the gene– dubbed gpc-B1 for its effect on grain protein content–in a wild emmer wheat that has grown naturally in the Middle East for millennia....

For years, researchers have struggled to find an efficient way to develop lenses that do not lose portions of light as it passes through—an effect that hinders the performance of lasers, medical diagnostic imaging equipment and sensor systems. Now researchers led by a group at Princeton University have developed a new technique using nanosize materials that sets the stage for new lenses that eliminate the errors and image distortion inherent in today’s optical technology—and may one day be used to check for toxic chemicals in the air and the body....

Hurricane Dorian could be the fifth major storm to threaten the United States in three years, driving home scientists’ warnings that climate change is shaping powerful tropical systems. Dorian is expected to sweep near the Florida coast as a Category 4 or 3 storm later today, but it will be remembered as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes in history. The deadly storm bore down on the Bahamas over the weekend with sustained winds of 185 mph....

The first drug to treat low sexual desire in women won approval from U.S. health regulators on Tuesday, but with a warning about potentially dangerous low blood pressure and fainting side effects, especially when taken with alcohol. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the pink pill, to be sold under the brand name Addyi and made by privately held Sprout Pharmaceuticals, will only be available through certified and specially trained health care professionals and pharmacies due to its safety issues....

A car that gets better mileage or a more tightly sealed home may tempt you to drive farther or crank the air conditioning up higher, but fears of these efficiency rebounds are largely overblown, at least in the United States, according to experts. Though some people may take an efficiency gain as a license to use more energy, the increases are often trivial compared with the savings. Usage could increase as much as 30 percent for improved heating and air conditioning, but for appliances like refrigerators, the rebound is close to zero, according to Larry Dale of the energy efficiency standards group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory....

MEXICO Eighteen black-footed albatrosses hatched on Guadalupe Island after their eggs were flown by commercial airliner from the North Pacific’s Midway Atoll. The atoll, which houses a third of the near-threatened birds’ breeding population, is vulnerable to flooding and sea-level rise. U.K. Jays and gray squirrels may have “planted” more than half of the many trees growing on two swaths of farmland abandoned in lowland England in 1961 and 1996, researchers found....

Melting permafrost is causing significant changes to the freshwater chemistry and hydrology of Alaska’s Yukon River and could be triggering global climate impacts, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report released yesterday. Researchers say the study, which analyzed more than 30 years of data, sheds light on how climate change is already affecting the Arctic. According to the report, the Yukon River and one of its major tributaries have accumulated increasing levels of calcium, magnesium and sulfates over the last three decades due to thawing permafrost....

As recently as 30,000 years ago, several species of upright-walking, intelligent hominins shared the earth with our ancestors. Tiny Homo floresiensis made stone tools on the island of Flores in Indonesia, Denisovans inhabited caves in southern Siberia, and Neandertals, with brains at least as large as our own, ranged across Ice Age Europe and the Middle East. They learned to survive in the cold, used fire, wore clothes, cared for the sick, buried the dead and maybe even wore jewelry....

It is not unusual for insect pests to feast on each other as well as on their staple veg, but it’s now been shown that tomato plants can team up to directly push caterpillars into cannibalism. “This is a new ecological mechanism of induced resistance that effectively changes the behaviour of the insects,” says Richard Karban, who studies interactions between herbivores and their host plants at the University of California at Davis and was not involved in the study....

Every August, just when many people go vacationing in the country where skies are dark, the best-known meteor shower, makes its appearance. This year, the Perseid meteor shower is expected to reach its peak overnight on Monday (Aug. 12), and there are some key tips to keep in mind for your “shooting stars” viewing. Peak activity for the Perseids is unfortunately predicted for the daylight hours across North America, so stargazers with clear skies are encouraged to seek out the meteor display during the pre-dawn hours of Monday and again during the early morning hours of Tuesday (Aug....

Mounting evidence indicates that members of the estrogen family of sex hormones can morph into neurotransmitters in the brain, fulfilling an unexpected role. The latest study comes from a team at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Liège in Belgium. Researchers manipulated the amounts of estradiol (a form of estrogen) in the brains of quail by injecting a compound that suppresses estradiol production. Within minutes the birds exhibited dramatic changes in sexual activity and pain thresholds....

We have a couple of advantages when it comes to dealing with climate change. For one thing, the parameters of the problem are remarkably clear: We can see the Arctic melting, the ocean acidifying, the mercury steadily rising. Droughts and floods reinforce daily our understanding of our predicament. More, researchers have made it relatively simple to understand what we can and can’t do going forward. If the planet is to hold its temperature increase to two degrees Celsius—and almost every nation agreed to that target in 2009 at the international talks in Copenhagen—then we simply have to leave most of the carbon we know about underground; it can’t be burned....

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what an extraordinary time we are living in for paleoanthropological discovery. The saga of human origins has undergone substantial revision since the start of the new millennium—and it is more fascinating than ever. In my introduction to the September issue of Scientific American, which is devoted to the story of us, I reflect on some of the more spectacular revelations to have emerged over the past 15 years....

A thousand years ago the islands that today form New Zealand were riotously wild. Birds, reptiles and invertebrates flourished in lush forests hundreds of miles from any other landmass. Māori settlers in the 1200s brought Polynesian rats for food, and together the humans and the rodents began to shift the ecological balance. Native species started to go extinct. Enter European ships, bearing new carnivores: more aggressive rat species, plus mice, stoats, and others....

The head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s Fukushima inquiry task force said yesterday his panel is concerned that the severe threats that Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami posed to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex reveal gaps in the voluntary guidelines that protect U.S. plants against incidents deemed unlikely. Task force leader Charles Miller, who briefed NRC commissioners yesterday, said the panel is also considering whether older nuclear plants should be held to more demanding standards that have been applied to newer reactors, based on evolving safety insights....

The Department of Energy is preparing to use the massive computing power of its national laboratories to tackle a daily scourge of American life: traffic jams. The effort is aimed at more than just improving motorists’ moods. If it works, it could cut U.S. transportation fuel consumption up to 20% and reduce auto emissions. A second goal is to recover as much as $100 billion in lost worker productivity by unsnarling rush hour traffic jams in U....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Are workplace vaccine mandates prompting some employees to quit rather than get a shot? A hospital in Lowville, New York, for example, had to shut down its maternity ward when dozens of staffers left their jobs rather than get vaccinated. At least 125 employees at Indiana University Health resigned after refusing to take the vaccine....