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Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) has long invested in renewable energy sources, including geothermal, wind and solar. Earlier this week, the utility company reached for the stars in announcing the first-ever deal of its kind: The California power utility, says spokesperson Jonathan Marshall, plans to purchase clean energy generated by a satellite beaming solar power from orbit. The agreement between PG&E and Solaren Corp., an eight-year-old company based in Manhattan Beach, Calif....

Good for more than barbecuing, charcoal may be the key to improving the health of mercury-laden soils and sediments. In the most polluted areas—Superfund sites and other contaminated hotspots—mercury cleanup has traditionally meant dredging, a disruptive and costly endeavor. But activated carbon, a granulated form of charcoal, can trap mercury in place, which may allow for cheaper, simpler remediation efforts. “Instead of digging up contaminated sediments or soil, we hoped to add something to the sediments that will keep the mercury from getting into the food web,” says Cynthia Gilmour of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center....

Austin, TEXAS—A new television series called “I F-ing Love Science” will air on the Science Channel with Craig Ferguson as the executive producer, the late-night star announced here Saturday night (March 8) at the South by Southwest Interactive festival.* Ferguson’s videotaped announcement was shown at a Science Channel event attended by Elise Andrew, the British biology student who created the wildly popular Facebook group that inspired the series. The event also featured performances by science celebrity Bill Nye and others....

Trawlers are smoothing the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, much as farmers flattened fields across Europe centuries ago. And it’s likely that similar smoothing is occurring wherever bottom trawlers operate across the Seven Seas. New research published online by Nature on September 5 reveals that bottom trawling—dragging massive nets across the seafloor to catch food such as deep-sea shrimp—is pushing sediment to fill in gaps on a daily basis, resulting in smooth undersea plains....

We live in an age when good nutrition practices–eat lots of whole grains, fresh fruits and fresh vegetables; hold the fatty meat and hydrogenated vegetable oils–are simple, straightforward and widely available. But visit a well-stocked health food store, pharmacy or supermarket, and you’d never know it. The variety of dietary supplements can be overwhelming, with dozens of vitamins, minerals and extracts offered alone and in combinations targeted at every possible intersection of age, sex and activity....

Recently, United States Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work publicly confirmed that the Pentagon’s Cyber Command was “dropping cyberbombs,” taking its ongoing battle against the Islamic State group into the online world. Other American officials, including President Barack Obama, have discussed offensive cyber activities, too. The American public has only glimpsed the country’s alleged cyberattack abilities. In 2012 The New York Times revealed the first digital weapon, the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear program....

CHILE Baffled by unexplained skin lesions on blue whales near Chile, scientists shot darts by crossbow to take samples from the whales’ blisters and fat in a bid to identify potential pollutant causes. RUSSIA A 46,000-year-old bird recovered from the Siberian permafrost is in such good condition that it looks like it died days ago, researchers say. It is the only nearly intact bird carcass found from the most recent ice age....

Whether it’s a work deadline, traffic jam, leaky roof or broken-down car, everyday stressors can undermine relationships. Routine annoyances tend to weigh on people, using up energy and making them more likely to lash out at a partner—even when the partner is clearly not to blame for the problem at hand. But the COVID-19 pandemic is nothing like a demanding boss or a delayed train. It has upended the world, hammered national economies and dominated headlines for more than a year—making it a pretty conspicuous target for negative sentiments....

Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman and first Iranian to win the Fields Medal, often described as the rough equivalent of a Nobel prize for mathematicians, died of metastatic breast cancer on July 14* at the age of 40. She had been a professor at Stanford University since 2008. The loss feels personal to many women in mathematics. “My mailbox is full of messages from other women,” says Ingrid Daubechies, a math professor at Duke University....

WASHINGTON—Donald Trump has promised to change Washington, and he surely will. Yet while he may play some wild cards in the realms of medicine, science, and public health, you can also look for some surprising continuity with President Obama’s administration. Here’s our preview of what to expect. DISEASE OUTBREAKS The H1N1 flu pandemic broke out within Obama’s first few months in office, and nearly 61 million Americans eventually contracted it. He later had to contend with the worst outbreak of Ebola in history, which left thousands dead in Africa and led to some hysteria stateside, and the unexpected rise of Zika....

Constant noise—such as from the construction project next door or the car alarm that will not stop—can irritate anyone. And birds are no exception. A recent study found that sounds from oil- and gas-drilling operations contributed to chronic stress in three species of songbirds, mimicking what occurs in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nathan Kleist, then a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Boulder, and his colleagues placed artificial nest boxes at various distances from gas-drilling pads in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico....

The Greenland ice sheet saw some of its highest melt rates on record last summer. Now, scientists say they know why it happened. It’s not only that temperatures were warm in the Arctic. An unusual set of atmospheric conditions, which altered the movement of air and the formation of clouds over Greenland, was a primary driver of the melting ice. These conditions may be linked to climate change in the Arctic, the researchers note....

By Ian Simpson WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The proportion of urban streams in the United States with potentially worrisome levels of pesticides for aquatic life has surged to 90 percent, a two-decade government study said on Thursday. Some of the more than 500 million pounds (220 million kg) of pesticides used yearly in the United States are concentrated at levels that pose a concern for fish and water-dwelling insects, the U.S. Geological Survey report on pesticides from 1992 to 2011 said....

Neutrinos are the oddballs of the subatomic particle family. They are everywhere, pouring in from the sun, deep space, and Earth and zipping through our bodies by the trillions every second. The particles are so tiny that they seldom interact with anything, making them extremely elusive and hard to study. Moreover, though neutrinos come in different types, or flavors, they can switch from one type to another as they travel near the speed of light....

In science fiction, the worst threats to space travelers are large ones: careening asteroids, ravenous creatures, imperial battle cruisers. In reality, though, the scariest menaces for humans in space are the tiniest: fast-moving elementary particles known as cosmic rays. On a long journey, they would give astronauts a dose of radiation serious enough to cause cancer. Unlike most of the other challenges of venturing into deep space, which engineers should be able to solve given enough time and money, cosmic rays pose irreducible risks, and dealing with them involves fundamental trade-offs....

There’s more than one way to catch a fly. Spider webs look like the perfect trap for ensnaring insects, but a spider ‘tree of life’ based on hundreds of genes suggests many spiders jettisoned the web in favor of other ways of capturing prey. The new studies overturn decades-old dogma, by showing that spiders that weave orb-shaped webs are not all close kin, with some species more related to species that catch prey differently....

U.S. EPA’s top air regulator is quietly shaping up to be one of the most influential players on President Trump’s environmental team. Bill Wehrum, a longtime industry lawyer and Clean Air Act guru, is back for his second stint as the head of EPA’s air office after his nomination sputtered during the George W. Bush administration. He’s a low-key, shrewd lawyer with an ambitious agenda that sounds familiar to his fans and foes alike....

Scientists in California have turned a dead rat clear, rendering it the world’s first transparent mammal. Julia Calderone explains the procedure in Scientific American’s October Advances, which scientists say could also be applied to humans, opening up a world of possibility for biologists—and crime show producers. Those producers should stay tuned, too, because forensic scientists are studying how soil microbes react to a dead body that is left outside to rot....

At the Washington Auto Show this month, automakers prominently displayed dozens of electric vehicles. Audi showcased the e-tron, its first electric SUV. Elsewhere in the massive showroom, Chevrolet exhibited a bright lime-green Bolt. But the prevalence of EVs at the show in downtown Washington, D.C., belied their deep unpopularity with American consumers. Plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles account for just around 2% of car sales in the country, according to the tracking website Inside EVs....

A collective of academic and industry players are planning to create 1,500 induced pluripotent stem cell lines from 500 patients to push forward drug discovery in areas such as diabetes, dementia and pain. The StemBANCC project, managed by the University of Oxford , UK, and including 10 pharma companies and 23 academic institutions, is backed by €26 million from the European Union’s Innovative Medicines Initiative and €21 million of ‘in-kind’ contributions from the European pharmaceutical industry....