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If electric vehicles are ever going to match the range of cars that run on fossil fuels, their batteries will need to store a lot more energy. Lithium–air (or lithium–oxygen) batteries are among the best candidates, but have been held back by serious obstacles. But a more durable design unveiled by chemists at the University of Cambridge, UK, offers promise that these problems can be overcome. The batteries devised by Clare Grey at Cambridge and her co-workers are small laboratory prototypes — a long way from a car battery pack — but their innovative combination of materials “addresses several major problems with the lithium–oxygen technology”, says Yury Gogotsi, a materials chemist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania....

Global temperatures this year are on track to be among the highest ever recorded, NOAA said after reporting that the first three months of 2020 were the planet’s second warmest in 141 years of record-keeping. The average global land and ocean surface temperature from January through March was 2.07 degrees Fahrenheit (1.15 degrees Celsius) above the average since 1880, NOAA reported. The average temperature so far this year is the second warmest ever recorded, behind only the first three months of 2016....

Climate change could play a role in exacerbating water conflict in Africa, likely worsening geopolitical wrangling over issues like the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam. The dam, a 6,450-megawatt hydropower project that’s nearing completion just miles from the Ethiopia-Sudan border, has been a point of contention in the region. While it will allow the Ethiopian government more control over flood prevention and help the approximately three-fourths of Ethiopians who currently don’t have access to electricity, downstream countries like Egypt and Sudan are concerned that it will impede their water supply....

Seven years ago, the FDA approved Yervoy, the first immune checkpoint inhibitor for patients with late-stage metastatic melanoma. It was the start of a new era for IO treatments, which rally a patient’s immune system to destroy cancerous cells. Four other checkpoint inhibitors have since been approved, and untold dollars and energy have flooded immuno-oncology (IO) subfields, including cancer vaccines, immunomodulators and chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapies. Seemingly overnight, IO grew from an experimental field of science into one of medicine’s hottest sectors....

What causes albinism? Are there any treatments for it? Raymond Boissy, a dermatology professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, explains (as told to Coco Ballantyne): Albinism is a genetic disease causing partial or complete loss of pigmentation, or coloring, in the skin, eyes and hair. It arises from mutations affecting cells, called melanocytes, that produce the pigment melanin, which gives color to those body parts. Inindividuals with albinism, genetic alterations interfere with the melanocytes’ production of pigment or their ability to distribute it to keratinocytes, the major cell type of the skin’s outer layer....

National forests whose names come from their large, majestic trees—such as Redwood National Park and Sequoia National Park in California—may need to rethink their brands as droughts increase in frequency and severity in many regions around the world due to climate change. New research published this week in the journal Nature Plants finds it’s the large trees that suffer most and are first to die. The four-person team of researchers conducted a global analysis of how forests respond to drought using already published and vetted inventory data from 40 drought events in 38 forests across the globe....

It’s easy to knock electric vehicles (EVs): It takes too long to recharge the batteries and there are too few places to do it. And besides, who will pay for all the new recharging stations that would be needed if the cars catch on? The International Energy Agency’s most optimistic scenario puts (pdf) plug-in hybrids or EVs at 15 percent of all cars on the road by 2020; other projections predict a mere 3 percent....

Dear EarthTalk: Can those energy-efficient compact fluorescent light bulbs that are popular now cause headaches because of the flickering they do? I converted my whole house over last fall and both my kids were complaining of headaches on and off. – Sandy, Eugene, OR With a switch to energy efficient compact fluorescent (CFL) light bulbs already in full swing in the U.S. and elsewhere—Australia has banned incandescents, Britain will soon, and the U....

By Heidi Ledford of Nature of magazineWith sales of more than $100 billion since it was introduced in 1997, the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor (atorvastatin) is an unparalleled pharmaceutical superstar. But as its patent expires on November 30 and its first generic competitor takes the stage, Lipitor is also a painful reminder of the challenge that such patent cliffs' pose for the big drug companies, including Lipitor's developer Pfizer, based in New York....

The newest members of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology may give a sense of the direction the panel could take in the era of President Trump. Under Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the committee has earned a reputation for questioning climate scientists and environmental groups that say human activity, like burning fossil fuels, is the main cause of rising temperatures. The panel has also challenged government scientists who refuted the theory of a global warming pause, a favorite conservative talking point....

Key concepts Biology Physics Heat transfer Thermal insulator Temperature Introduction How lovely it is to come home after a chilly winter walk to a cozy house, put on your fluffy slippers and settle by the fireplace with a warming cup of hot chocolate? Animals such as the polar bear, Arctic wolf or Antarctic penguin are not so lucky to have such a place to keep warm. How do they face the extreme winter temperatures?...

California Democratic leaders want their state to commit to a future of 100 percent renewable electricity, a goal approved so far by only one U.S. state—Hawaii. Top officials in both places hope their policies will serve as a model for others as the Trump administration rejects actions on climate change. California and Hawaii offer very different models for committing their power sectors to clean electricity. They differ on everything from mandate deadlines to what’s considered renewable....

Much is known about Maya kings, lords and priests. Gaps remain, but we have long had some idea of how they lived. But what about the majority—the rest of Maya society? This question has been harder to answer. To shed some light on the subject, doctoral student Ashley Sharpe at the University of Florida examined animal bones found in three Maya cities. The bones belong to the university’s Florida Museum of Natural History collection, of which Kitty Emery is one of the curators and co-author of the study published in a recent issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology....

As intangible as they may seem, memories have a firm biological basis. According to textbook neuroscience, they form when neighboring brain cells send chemical communications across the synapses, or junctions, that connect them. Each time a memory is recalled, the connection is reactivated and strengthened. The idea that synapses store memories has dominated neuroscience for more than a century, but a new study by scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, may fundamentally upend it: instead memories may reside inside brain cells....

By Julie Steenhuysen CHICAGO (Reuters) - Three out of four U.S. adults have a predicted “heart age” that is older than they are, putting them at increased risk for heart attacks and strokes, government researchers said on Tuesday. “Your heart may be older than you are. For most adults in the United States, it is,” said Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which released the first study to provide population-level estimates of heart age nationwide....

The future that NASA dared to dream of for a decade has finally become reality. Crew-1, SpaceX’s first operational mission to the International Station Station (ISS) for NASA, arrived at the orbiting lab late Monday night (Nov. 16), 27 hours after launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a Falcon 9 rocket. About two hours after the Crew Dragon capsule “Resilience” docked with the station, NASA astronauts Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi floated from the private craft into the ISS, beginning their six-month stay on the orbiting lab....

Five thousand years ago nomadic horseback riders from the Ukrainian steppe charged through Europe and parts of Asia. They brought with them a language that is the root of many of those spoken today—including English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian and Persian. That is the most widely accepted explanation for the origin of this ancient tongue, termed Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Recent genetic findings confirm this hypothesis but also raise questions about how the prehistoric language evolved and spread....

Most people rarely deal with irrational numbers—it would be, well, irrational, as they run on forever, and representing them accurately requires an infinite amount of space. But irrational constants such as π and √2—numbers that cannot be reduced to a simple fraction—frequently crop up in science and engineering. These unwieldy numbers have plagued mathematicians since the ancient Greeks; indeed, legend has it that Hippasus was drowned for suggesting irrationals existed. Now, though, a nearly 80-year-old quandary about how well they can be approximated has been solved....

Paleontologists working in the Canadian Arctic have discovered the fossilized remains of an animal that elucidates one of evolution’s most dramatic transformations: that which produced land-going vertebrates from fish. Dubbed Tiktaalik roseae, the large, predatory fish bears a number of features found in four-limbed creatures, a group known as tetrapods. Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago and his colleagues found Tiktaalik on Ellesmere Island, some 600 miles from the North Pole, in deposits dating to 375 million years ago....

The ocean is releasing ozone-depleting gases at a faster rate due to rising global temperatures, prompting scientists to warn of more ultraviolet radiation and a greater cancer risk. Chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, have slowly collected in deep ocean water for decades. The human-produced gas, commonly used for manufacturing aerosol sprays and refrigerants, is released into the atmosphere and then sucked into the ocean from surface wind, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....