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Editors Note: An EPA official said on Wednesday that Trump administration officials were reviewing the content of the agency’s website but had no immediate plans to remove the content on climate change, news reports said. The Trump administration has instructed U.S. EPA to get rid of mentions of climate change from its website, Reuters reported late yesterday. Communications staff were told to remove the agency’s webpage on climate change, according to two unnamed EPA staff members....

The U.N. agency responsible for global shipping took its first halting steps toward greenhouse gas regulation Friday, despite the objections of the Trump White House. Sixty-five countries, led by the European Union and Pacific islands, succeeded in shepherding a resolution through the International Maritime Organization calling on the shipping industry to shed at least half its emissions by 2050 compared with 2008 levels. The measure was approved during the IMO’s two-week meeting in London, where only members of a specific committee had a vote....

GLASGOW, Scotland—The U.S. and China announced a wide-ranging plan for climate cooperation yesterday to inject momentum into global efforts to contain warming. The joint declaration comes as climate talks speed toward a conclusion here, and officials hope that cooperation between the world’s two largest emitters could pave the way for progress at this year’s summit. “And as I’ve said many times, the United States and China have no shortage of differences, but not on climate," said U....

In what may come as a surprise to freethinkers and nonconformists happily defying social conventions these days in New York City, Paris, Sydney and other centers of Western culture, a new study traces the origins of contemporary individualism to the powerful influence of the Catholic Church in Europe more than 1,000 years ago, during the Middle Ages. According to the researchers, strict church policies on marriage and family structure completely upended existing social norms and led to what they call “global psychological variation,” major changes in behavior and thinking that transformed the very nature of the European populations....

A great deal of scientific research is driven by a very fundamental question: What makes us human? And what are the properties of the human brain that make these talents possible? One challenge facing scientists is that answering these questions often requires the use of nonhuman animals as subjects. In fact, animal models have even proved essential when it comes to studying uniquely human talents, such as language. In 2001 Cecilia S....

How much money do you put away each month toward retirement? Maybe you sock away all you can, already dreaming of that Florida condo. Or maybe you can’t even imagine where you’ll be then, what you’ll want to use the money for, even what you’ll be like: when you think about yourself far in the future, it’s almost like thinking about someone else. A growing body of work suggests that the more you feel your future self is really you, the more you’ll put in his or her—whoops, your—bank account....

I recently saw Eileen, a 45-year-old female accountant, in my office who reported an aggravating “eye twitching.” Now this is a common, yet potentially annoying, medical problem. It may not be debilitating, but it’s sometimes enough to distract you from your tasks and drive you bonkers. Eileen tells me that she’s had intermittent and multiple bouts of seemingly non-stop eye twitching in her eyelid almost daily for one month, with each episode a few minutes long....

White House officials urged EPA to make changes to an Obama-era methane rule that would maximize cost savings for the oil and gas industry while allowing the release of more planet-warming emissions, government documents show. The exchange came this past spring and summer, as EPA was working to relax a 2016 rule stipulating how frequently oil companies must check for and repair methane leaks. The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs repeatedly pressured EPA to relax inspection requirements, according to hundreds of pages of documents posted last week on Regulations....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Recent reports suggest that terrorists can now create bombs so thin that they cannot be detected by the current X-ray screening that our carry-on bags undergo. In an effort to protect against such threats, the U.S is considering banning laptops and other large electronic devices in the passenger cabins of airplanes flying between Europe and the United States....

Every day we are bombarded with temptations — to cheat on our diets, to spend instead of save our paychecks, to tell little white lies. It can be exhausting to have to continually remind ourselves that, long-term, we want to be upstanding people, so we shouldn’t make tempting but unethical short-term decisions. But what if simply thinking about dishonesty could make it easier for us to behave ethically? This novel possibility comes from a set of studies published May 22 in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which demonstrate that anticipating temptation decreases the likelihood of a person engaging in poor behavior....

I am a diligent worker who follows through on my commitments. I’m quick to get started on tasks, usually avoid getting sidetracked and have a fairly optimistic outlook, although I can be plagued by self-doubt. An introvert, I prefer working alone and value autonomy. At times I can be untrusting and skeptical of other people’s motives, and I have a tendency to become frustrated by and anxious about work-related difficulties. Sometimes I struggle to balance work and life....

As long as the weather cooperates, Friday will mark the end of an era for the astronomy world, as NASA sends up its final manned spacecraft. However, odds are against the weather being trouble-free. Space shuttle Atlantis is scheduled for launch at 11:26 a.m., EDT, making it the shuttle’s 33rd flight and NASA’s 135th shuttle mission. Showers and thunderstorms are pretty much a daily occurrence in Florida throughout the summer, and it doesn’t take much activity in the vicinity of Kennedy Space Center to scrub a launch....

When three, four or five people gather to solve a problem, chances are they will succeed beyond the efforts of an equivalent number of individuals working separately, even if those soloists are the brightest available. So conclude researchers at the University of Illinois. The investigators enrolled 760 of the school’s students to solve complex letter and word problems. Some toiled as individuals while others functioned in groups of two, three, four or five....

With enough training, pigeons can distinguish between the works of Picasso and Monet. Ravens can identify themselves in a mirror. And on a university campus in Japan, crows are known to intentionally leave walnuts in a crosswalk and let passing traffic do their nut cracking. Many bird species are incredibly smart. Yet among intelligent animals, the “bird brain” often doesn’t get much respect. Two papers published today in Science find birds actually have a brain that is much more similar to our complex primate organ than previously thought....

After a series of unusually hot summers, France and other parts of Europe last week experienced another intense heatwave that broke temperature records across the continent. For one group of climate scientists, the event presented a rare opportunity: to rapidly analyse whether the cause of the heatwave — which made headlines around the world — could be attributed to global warming. After a seven-day analysis, their results are in: climate change made the temperatures reached in France last week at least five times more likely to occur than in a world without global warming....

In New Zealand’s Hauraki Gulf, waves crash against cliffs and pull dirt into the ocean, while boats and storms stir up silt from the seafloor. Rivers carry fertilizer from the mainland that causes light-blocking algal blooms, which mingle with pollution from nearby Auckland. Together, they cloud the coastal ocean, depriving organisms living deeper in the water column of their main source of energy—sunlight. As an environmental threat, this phenomenon, called coastal darkening, is relatively understudied....

WASHINGTON—Congress late Wednesday approved federal funding that will provide $1.1 billion to fight the Zika virus, along with money necessary to keep the government running through Dec. 9. The Senate vote was 72 to 26. Hours after the Senate approval, the House of Representatives followed suit, passing its bill by a 342 to 85 vote. As the Sept. 30 deadline to reach a budget deal drew near, the Senate leadership crafted a compromise that ended months of bickering....

KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of the Congo—In the doorway of a one-room yellow fever ward in downtown Kinshasa, a toddler named Julia is slung over her mother’s shoulder. Moments later a nurse directs mother and child to the last vacant bed and inserts an intravenous line into the girl’s wrist. Her lemon-yellow eyes staring vacantly ahead, Julia does not flinch as the needle punctures her skin. She could be awaiting a hand massage or a manicure....

A drug that was seen as a major test of the leading theory behind Alzheimer’s disease has failed in a large trial of people with mild dementia. Critics of the ‘amyloid hypothesis’, which posits that the disease is triggered by a build-up of amyloid protein in the brain, have seized on the results as evidence of its weakness. But the jury is still out on whether the theory will eventually yield a treatment....

People who like milk chocolate have slightly different microbes in their intestines than those who prefer their chocolate dark, although researchers do not know why. Significant differences in the so-called microbiome are also found in individuals based on whether or not they eat a lot of fiber or take certain medications—such as the diabetes drug metformin, female hormones or antihistamines. But all these variations account for only a small fraction of the microbial diversity seen in the guts of northern Europeans, according to new research published today in a special section of Science....