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Chevron Corp. walked a narrow line yesterday in acknowledging humans’ role in climate change while highlighting uncertainties that could help shield it from cities’ claims for damages stemming from sea-level rise. The California-based oil giant fielded questions from a federal judge on its understanding of climate change science, while the other four oil companies named by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland as contributing to climate change stayed silent. Chevron’s attorney acknowledged mainstream climate science, which shows human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide playing a central role in rising average temperatures, while still disputing liability for effects linked to climate change....

By Kate Kelland LONDON, (Reuters) - Volkswagen’s admission that it rigged car emission tests has prompted environmental and health experts to ask whether such deception could have hampered progress in reducing death and disease from air pollution. Volkswagen’s Chief Executive Martin Winterkorn resigned on Wednesday over the falsification of test data from diesel cars in the United States, the latest twist in a scandal that has rocked the global car industry and raised concerns about what it may mean for the environment and public health....

Key concepts Water Ice Oceans Sea levels Climate change Introduction Have you ever noticed that if you leave an ice cube out on the kitchen counter and come back to check on it in a while, you find a puddle? The same thing happens to ice in nature—if the temperature gets warm enough, ice melts. In this activity you’ll explore what happens to the sea levels when ice at the North or South poles melts....

A few weeks ago computer scientist J. Alex Halderman rolled an electronic voting machine onto a Massachusetts Institute of Technology stage and demonstrated how simple it is to hack an election. In a mock contest between George Washington and Benedict Arnold three volunteers each voted for Washington. But Halderman, whose research involves testing the security of election systems, had tampered with the ballot programming, infecting the machine’s memory card with malicious software....

Dear EarthTalk: I read that a single child born in the U.S. has a greater effect on the environment than a dozen children born in a developing country? Can you explain why?—Josh C., via e-mail It is well known that Americans consume far more natural resources and live much less sustainably than people from any other large country of the world. “A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil,” reports the Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford, adding that the average American will drain as many resources as 35 natives of India and consume 53 times more goods and services than someone from China....

Mobile gadgets may have changed the way people live and work, but today’s once-groundbreaking ability to stream live video to a smartphone will seem pretty blasé compared with what the next generation of wireless technology promises. The tech’s so-called fifth generation, or 5G, is expected to connect billions of machines—kitchen appliances, medical devices and automobiles, to name a few—to one another and the Web, creating the much-hyped Internet of Things. And 5G touts speeds up to 100 times faster than current networks, which could mean downloading a full-length high-definition movie onto a smartphone in seconds rather than minutes....

Will al Qaeda respond to the death of Osama bin Laden with serious cyberattacks? The short answer is no. Despite an active interest in cyberattacks, al Qaeda has not managed any successful assaults other than some posting of propaganda, ATM milking and credit-card fraud. This is mainly because its key computer experts have been captured or killed. Here we reconstruct the group’s efforts to tamper with Western technology: July 1999: The first cyberconflict between Hamas and Israel inspires al Qaeda’s leaders, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed....

Intense auroral emissions from the universe’s tiniest stars may provide a new way to hunt for rocky planets that might otherwise go unseen. As a world moves through the magnetic field of its star, it can produce bursts of radio waves. The effect is akin to one astronomers have closely studied right here in the solar system: periodic radio emissions made by interactions between Jupiter and its moon Io. Using a powerful radio telescope, researchers have now identified multiple stars emitting the telltale activity....

Should you happen to be thirsty and wander into the Brewer’s Cabinet bar in Reno, Nev., in the next few days, I have a suggestion: please pay the bar tab. This might seem excessively basic advice. Yet there exist those who feel that paying is sometimes optional. The Brewer’s Cabinet doesn’t take kindly to that philosophy. As KRNV-TV reports, an employee of the bar was upset when a customer allegedly ran out on a $100 bar tab....

Master distiller Harlen Wheatley of Buffalo Trace Distillery draws a bourbon whiskey sample out of the barrel and pours it into a brandy snifter glass. Wheatley raises it into the light; the bourbon illuminates with rich colors of caramel, gold, straw yellow and light brown. He tastes the seven-year-old drink known as W. L. Weller and says, “That’s really coming along.” As Wheatley moves onto the next barrel, the glass sits in the light, the bourbon shining brightly and illustrating the chemical change wrought by the barrel....

The U.S. has one of the highest hospital readmission rates in the world. About 20 percent of Medicare patients wind up being readmitted within 30 days after discharge, according to government data. In Canada and England, that figure is only about 8 percent. Hospitals have tried a variety of strategies including patient counseling and home visits to lower readmissions, with mixed results. The office that administers Medicare is hoping that new financial penalties, part of the Affordable Care Act, will push hospitals to tackle the problem more aggressively....

Scientists in South Korea have developed a reversible electrochemical mirror (REM) that can switch between a transparent and reflective state, and remain reflective for up to two hours without external electrical power. Such mirrors could be used in smart windows to control lighting and reduce cooling costs for buildings. The REM, developed by the group of Eunkyoung Kim at Yonsei University, consists of a thin layer of silver-containing electrolyte sandwiched between two transparent electrode panes....

With protesters in many American cities marching for justice, and with the Supreme Court delivering a historic ruling protecting gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, this summer is shaping up to be a watershed moment for equality in America. But while much of our national conversation is focused on urgent issues like police brutality, it’s time we acknowledged that American health care, too, is long overdue for a reckoning with systemic forms of discrimination that have a detrimental effect on the health and well-being of tens of millions of American women....

With luck, the Hubble Space Telescope will yield more startling images of the cosmos for years. But because NASA is no longer servicing the telescope, it is expected to give up the ghost sometime after 2020. That does not mean that the Hubble discoveries will stop, however. NASA maintains an archive of data gathered over Hubble’s lifetime—the telescope went live in 1991—and makes it available to the public for free. The archive has already yielded discoveries such as nebulae and distant galaxies....

You and a fire ant have something in common: you can both smell dirt, and, odds are, you both like it. Although most humans agree that fresh dirt smells sweet, that is not a view universally shared. Fruit flies hate the smell, apparently because it signals spoiled food. On the other hand, mosquitoes like dirt smell and use it as a cue for egg laying. And as I wrote last spring, tiny arthropods called springtails think dirt not only smells great, it’s the smell of steak night at the Sizzler....

A huge genetic study that sought to pinpoint how the human genome is evolving suggests that natural selection is getting rid of harmful genetic mutations that shorten people’s lives. The work, published in PLoS Biology, analysed DNA from 215,000 people and is one of the first attempts to probe directly how humans are evolving over one or two generations. To identify which bits of the human genome might be evolving, researchers scoured large US and UK genetic databases for mutations whose prevalence changed across different age groups....

By Janelle WeaverThe indifference of some mosquitoes to a common insect repellent is due to an easily inherited genetic trait that can be rapidly evolved by later generations, a new study suggests.By selective breeding, James Logan and colleagues at Rothamsted Research in Harpenden, UK, created strains of Aedes aegyptimosquitoes in which half of the females do not respond to DEET (N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) – a powerful insect repellent. They suggest that this rapidly evolved insensitivity is due to a single dominant gene – one that confers resistance even if the trait is inherited from only one parent....

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) scientists feel more accepted in the workplace than their peers in other professions, a US survey suggests. The study, published in the Journal of Homosexuality, also found that respondents in scientific fields with a high proportion of women, such as the social sciences, were more likely to be out to their colleagues than those in more male-intensive disciplines, such as engineering. That result may suggest that labs with more women tend to be more receptive to people who do not fit the stereotype of a scientist as a straight, white man, says Jeremy Yoder, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and co-author of the study....

WHAT WOULD YOU PAY to ensure that your children would not be born with disabling or fatal recessive genetic diseases? The obvious answer is “anything,” but that’s not what most people actually do. Individual screening tests can already identify silent carriers of many single faulty recessive genes—the kind that, when inherited in double (one copy from each parent), can lead to conditions such as cystic fibrosis and Tay-Sachs disease. But almost no one gets tested for all these mutations before conceiving because it would be too expensive—the dozens of tests cost several hundred dollars apiece....

Here’s something I thought I’d never say: Donald Trump was correct. Back in 1997, anyway. About shaking hands. “The Japanese have it right,” the allegedly germaphobic Trump wrote (with co-author Kate Bohner) in the book Trump: The Art of the Comeback. “They stand slightly apart and do a quick, formal and very beautiful bow in order to acknowledge each other’s presence … I wish we would develop a similar greeting custom in America....