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Is sexual orientation similar to eye color, consisting of fairly discrete categories? Or is it more like height—that is, falling along a continuum? As a psychologist, I have explored that question in several venues, including the February/March 2006 issue of Scientific American Mind [“Do Gays Have a Choice?”]. Although common thinking holds that everyone is either “gay” or “straight,” my new survey of nearly 18,000 people who voluntarily answered an online quiz shows that these terms are highly misleading....

The major hurricane now bearing down on Texas could prove to be one of the biggest political tests of President Trump’s tenure. The hurricane is projected to directly hit Corpus Christi today, a city of more than 325,000 people, and it has the potential to cause billions of dollars in damage. Early projections have at least 300,000 losing power, and city officials in Corpus Christi have prodded people living in parts of the city to evacuate....

The Biden administration owes the world more detail about how the United States plans to deliver on its Paris Agreement commitments. When the White House unveiled its new pledge in April—vowing to cut greenhouse gas output by 50 to 52 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2030—it provided few specifics about how it proposed to get there. But global partners and environmental advocates generally welcomed the ambitious pledge as a signal that the United States was eager to reestablish itself as a climate leader after four years of disengagement and withdrawal....

Algae growth fuels Greenland ice sheet melt Algae growth as a result of climate change is making the Greenland ice sheet, a primary contributor to sea-level rise, melt faster, according to a new study. Algae grows naturally on the ice sheet, but it thrives under a warmer climate. It makes the Greenland ice sheet, which is the second-largest ice sheet on Earth, less reflective of the sun, which means the ice absorbs more of the sun’s heat....

(Credit:Sarah Tew/CNET)Last week, Ma Ailun, a 23-year-old woman from China’s Xinjiang region, was allegedly electrocuted when she answered a call on her iPhone 5 while it was charging, according to the China-based Xinhua news agency.Related storiesPhone 5s hit by fingerprint sensor issues, claims reportMLB boss: I’ve never sent an e-mail, but I just got an iPhoneApple gearing up iPhone 5S for output this month, analyst saysApple reportedly signs Samsung for next-gen iPhone chipsTech Minute: Apps to keep the kids happy in the backseat In an e-mailed statement to Reuters on Monday, an Apple spokesperson said the company is “deeply saddened to learn of this tragic incident and offer our condolences to the Ma family....

With a trick of chemistry, researchers have sped up, and smoothed, the process of three-dimensional (3D) printing, producing objects in minutes instead of hours. 3D printers typically build one horizontal layer at time. Some do so by depositing droplets of building material as if they were laying tiny bricks. Others create their products by shining ultraviolet rays up into a bath of liquid resin. The light solidifies the resin, and the partial product is pulled upwards one notch to repeat the process for the next layer below....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Whether baked as chips into a cookie, melted into a sweet warm drink or molded into the shape of a smiling bunny, chocolate is one of the world’s most universally consumed foods. Even the biggest chocolate lovers, though, might not recognize what this ancient food has in common with kimchi and kombucha: its flavors are due to fermentation....

Global carbon emissions are expected to hit an all-time high in 2019, scientists say, smashing a previous record set in 2018. By the end of the year, emissions from industrial activities and the burning of fossil fuels will pump an estimated 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And total carbon emissions from all human activities, including agriculture and land use, will likely cap off at about 43....

On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency held an international press conference to announce new results from a satellite called Planck. The spacecraft had mapped the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, light emitted more than 13 billion years ago just after the big bang, in better detail than ever before. The new map, scientists told the audience of journalists, confirms a theory that cosmologists have held dear for 35 years: that the universe began with a bang followed by a brief period of hyperaccelerated expansion known as inflation....

Would you take one human life to save many? The obvious answer might seem to be “yes” —but what if your choice also meant you would be sacrificing your own child? Such dilemmas suggest that moral decision making has an emotional component, and now scientists have found the brain region responsible for generating these feelings. Researchers studied patients with damage to their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area in the forebrain where social emotions such as compassion, guilt and shame arise....

By Ros KrasnyWASHINGTON (Reuters) - General Motors Co will begin selling a mid-sized sedan next summer that can be powered by either gasoline or compressed natural gas, the U.S. automaker’s chief executive said on Wednesday.The 2015 Chevrolet Impala, GM’s first car powered by natural gas, will feature a powertrain that switches from compressed natural gas to gasoline seamlessly and has a total driving range of up to 500 miles, Dan Akerson said in a speech to be delivered at an energy summit in Washington....

A small but operational ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) plant was inaugurated in Hawaii last week, making it the first in the world. The opening of the 100-kilowatt facility marked the first time a closed-cycle OTEC plant will be connected to the U.S. grid. But that amount of energy production can power only 120 Hawaiian homes for a year, a tiny drop in the ocean for the island state’s own energy needs....

Four years ago Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow turned to her husband after looking up some movie trivia online and asked, “What did we do before the Internet?” Thus, Sparrow set out to investigate how Google, and all the information it proffers, has changed how people think. Four psychology experiments later Sparrow has her answer, which was published in Science this past August. “[The Web] is an external memory storage space, and we make it responsible for remembering things,” she says....

Wild chimpanzees from different places often display distinct regional behaviors, leading researchers to suspect that chimps can maintain local traditions across many generations. In support of this theory, Victoria Horner of Emory University and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and her colleagues recently showed that captive chimpanzees can transfer newly acquired knowledge through a chain of simulated generations. The study suggests that cultural learning may be rooted deep within the evolutionary process and may be traced back to a common ancestor....

This summer 12 new recruits will report to NASA Johnson Space Center to start a two-year boot camp for “astronaut candidates.” They will train in teamwork, spacewalking and spacecraft operations, as well as learning Russian—a skill they will need to communicate with cosmonauts on joint missions. Yet when and where they will eventually fly is still unclear. The lucky 12 beat out a record 18,300 applicants to become astronauts at a time when the job description is somewhat unspecified....

Bundle, a New York City-based start-up, has turned to a source it deems more objective: credit-card data. Bundle receives data on credit-card transactions from Citi, one of its investors. The data are stripped of personal details, but every cardholder is tagged with a unique identifier so spending can be tracked. The data also retain demographic information such as salary, marital status and household size. Bundle then compares each transaction against a commercially available list of 15 million merchants that accept credit cards, which includes the merchants’ locations....

Editor’s note: This excerpt of a chapter from The Plateau Effect describes a study that authors Bob Sullivan and Hugh Thompson conducted with Carnegie Mellon University into the nature of “digital distractions.” Listeners in general are terrible at comprehension, but the authors found that the mere possibility that one’s phone may ring diminishes a person’s cognition skills up to 20 percent. The authors’ research adds to a growing body of work that suggests attention is becoming an increasingly rare commodity, thanks to the proliferation of gadgets, not to mention people, vying for our limited time....

Do girls take longer than boys to recover after a concussion? A recent study of middle- and high school athletes they found that the female athletes took twice as long to be symptom-free as the male athletes. Shockingly, the female athletes took nearly a full month to report being symptom-free, while the male athletes took less than two weeks. It was reported widely across the media as evidence the young women may have a special problem with concussions....

Up to 4 percent of the DNA of people today who live outside ­Africa came from Neandertals, the result of interbreeding between Neandertals and early modern humans. That conclusion comes from scientists led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who pieced together the first draft of the Neandertal genome—which represents about 60 percent of the entire genome—using DNA obtained from three Neandertal bones that come from Vindija cave in Croatia and are more than 38,000 years old....

After 22 years of failed treatments, including rehabilitation, psychotherapy and an array of psychiatric medications, a middle-aged Dutch man decided to take an extraordinary step to fight his heroin addiction. He underwent an experimental brain surgery called deep brain stimulation (DBS). At the University of Amsterdam, researchers bored small holes in his skull and guided two long, thin probes deep into his head. The ends of the probes were lined with small electrodes, which were positioned in his nucleus accumbens, a brain area near the base of the skull that is associated with addiction....