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The promise of driverless electric taxis, aptly called robocabs, just got brighter. Cheerleaders for futuristic cars, which can navigate roads with zero input from humans, have for years drummed up interest by focusing on how much safer these cars will be and how traffic jams would become history once these intelligent cars take to the roads. Now, a new study suggests that there may be another reason to embrace the new technology—substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions....

The explosions that blew apart the universe’s first stars are shrouded in mystery. These energetic blasts are inherently difficult to recreate in computer simulations, even using modern computing power. “It’s one of the hardest physics problems out there,” says Alexander Ji, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, Calif. Furthermore, he notes that researchers still lack an answer to a simple question: What types of stars do—and do not—explode? Scientists often assume the first stars ended their lives as spherical supernovae....

Seizing on the surging popularity of at-home DNA testing kits, top academic medical institutions are opening clinics that promise to probe much deeper into your DNA—if you’re willing to pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars out of pocket to learn about disease risks that may be lurking in your genes. Genomic sequencing programs that cater to apparently healthy adults have been started in the past few years at the Mayo Clinic; the University of California, San Francisco; and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, a nonprofit research institution in Alabama....

Susan starts her day by jogging to the edge of town, cutting back through a cornfield for an herbal tea at the downtown Starbucks and heading home for a shower. It sounds like a healthy morning routine, but Susan is in fact exposing herself to a rogue’s gallery of chemicals: pesticides and herbicides on the corn, plasticizers in her tea cup, and the wide array of ingredients used to perfume her soap and enhance the performance of her shampoo and moisturizer....

President-elect Donald Trump has selected first-term Republican Rep. Ryan Zinke to lead the Interior Department, multiple news outlets reported last night. Zinke is a fifth-generation Montanan who served for 23 years as a Navy SEAL and then three years in the Montana Senate before being elected to the House. He comes to the table with strong feelings about keeping federal lands in the hands of the government, a belief that “something is going on” with the climate and an embrace of an “all of the above” energy policy....

In the spring of 2013 a strain of influenza virus that had never infected humans before began to make people in China extremely ill. Although the virus, known as H7N9, had evolved among birds, it had mutated in a way that allowed it to spread to men, women and children. Within several months H7N9 sickened 135 individuals, of whom 44 died, before subsiding with the advance of summer weather. We got lucky with H7N9....

Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s extraordinary claim two weeks ago that he had helped to make the first babies—twin girls—with edited genomes shocked the world. Many questions remain about the experiments, but among researchers’ chief concerns are the potential effects of the genetic alterations on the girls’ health. He, a genome-editing researcher at the Southern University of Science and Technology of China in Shenzhen, says in several YouTube videosthat he impregnated a woman with embryos that had been edited to disable a gene that allows HIV to infect cells....

Just days ago, Samsung announced the Samsung Galaxy S III, the global, quad-core, Android Ice Cream Sandwich successor to its best-selling smartphone ever, the Galaxy S II. CNET readers’ reactions were mixed, with several comments that the 8-megapixel camera didn’t seem too hot. Rumors of a 12-megapixel camera leading up to the announcement were partly to blame. It’s no wonder that some felt that a perfectly good 8-megapixel spec was taking a step back, especially with the 16-megapixel shooter on the HTC Titan II out in the wild, and Nokia’s 41-megapixel 808 PureView, a Mobile World Congress stunner....

Thousands of webpages with climate change information have been removed or buried at agencies including U.S. EPA, the Interior and Energy departments and elsewhere across the government, according to a new report. The study from the watchdog group Environmental Data & Governance Initiative tracked a year of editing of government websites and has found a drastic overhaul of public information on climate change during the Trump administration. Information that has been removed or buried includes research such as climate mitigation strategies for cities and states, a student’s guide to climate change and the benefits of renewable energy....

Key concepts Physics Angular momentum Tension Introduction You might have seen figure skaters spinning around quickly and then tucking their arms to spin faster—or opening them to spin more slowly. This happens, thanks to a physics concept known as the “conservation of angular momentum.” But how can you try it out if you don’t have any ice skates around? Find out in this simple activity that only requires common household supplies!...

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As self-driving cars come closer to being common on American roads, much of the rhetoric promoting them has to do with safety. About 40,000 people die on U.S. roads every year, and driver errors are linked to more than 90 percent of crashes. But many of the biggest advocates of autonomous vehicles aren’t car companies looking to improve the safety of their existing products....

In particle physics, data long outlives the detectors that generate it. A decade ago the 4,100-metric-ton Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) reached the end of its life and was shut down, stripped of its parts for use in other experiments. Now a fresh analysis of old CDF data has unearthed a stunning discrepancy in the mass of an elementary particle, the W boson, that could point the way to new, as yet undiscovered particles and interactions....

BOSTON – Civil engineers build rugged things designed to last for decades, like roads, bridges, culverts and water treatment plants. But a University of New Hampshire professor wants his profession to become much more flexible. In a changing climate, civil engineer Paul Kirshen argues, facilities will have to adapt to changing conditions over their useful lives – and, in some instances, be allowed to fail. A leading example of this approach: The Netherlands’ Room for the River project: Decades of thinking that floods must be held back are being tossed aside as workers move dikes to give the Rhine River room to spill....

For the first time, scientists have discovered an Earth-size alien planet in the habitable zone of its host star, an “Earth cousin” that just might have liquid water and the right conditions for life. The newfound planet, called Kepler-186f, was first spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope and circles a dim red dwarf star about 490 light-years from Earth. While the host star is dimmer than Earth’s sun and the planet is slightly bigger than Earth, the positioning of the alien world coupled with its size suggests that Kepler-186f could have water on its surface, scientists say....

For conservationists, it is an alarming and rapidly worsening problem: Natural areas continue to be degraded and species lost at an unprecedented rate, even in the most remote forests—and even as the extent of parks, refuges and other protected areas has dramatically increased. One explanation, a study published this week in Nature Ecology & Evolution argues, is that policy-makers working to designate protected areas need to have far more precise targets....

While the storm damaged thousands of homes and buildings and caused dozens of deaths, the impact was not nearly as great as the devastation wrought by Super Typhoon Haiyan a year ago. Haiyan slammed into the islands as the strongest ever recorded tropical cyclone to make landfall. Although Hagupit wasn’t as devastating, it was a whopping fifth storm to reach Category 5 strength (the highest designation on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale) in the West Pacific ocean basin this year....

Nearly six decades later, there is an opportunity to bring America’s great cat back to the United States for good. Proof of jaguars in North America is ample. In the 19th century, Texas Rangers shot one north of San Antonio. Sam Houston proudly wore a vest made out of jaguar skin. Harder-to-believe but nonetheless intriguing observations come from California, Colorado, Oklahoma and Louisiana—and even Virginia and North Carolina. The historical evidence for jaguars is strongest in Arizona and New Mexico, especially in the ancestral homelands of the Apache, Yavapai, Tohono O’odham, Pueblos, Hopi, Navajo and Zuni peoples....

Municipal water can be contaminated by electronic waste and other sources of heavy metals—but collecting, chemically preserving and transporting samples to laboratories for testing is challenging for remote communities. To streamline the process, Emily Hanhauser, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and her colleagues created a low-tech sample-collection device that costs less than two dollars to make. It consists of a plastic handle tipped by propellerlike attachments made from polymer mesh, which contain small packets of absorbent resin beads that attract heavy metal ions....

Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think by Paul Dolan Hudson Street Press, 2014 ($25.95) Are people happier in the Midwest or in southern California? Most folks point to the difference in weather and guess the latter. But in fact, the populations of these regions report roughly the same level of overall life satisfaction. That is because people quickly acclimate to weather, turning their attention to other aspects of their lives....

This week, President Joe Biden will sign the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 into law. The legislation includes nearly $53 billion in funding to encourage domestic manufacture of semiconductor chips, as well as continued research into this field. “CHIPS” stands for “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors,” but the act goes beyond computer components: it proposes big funding increases for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology....