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Quantum entanglement, a phenomenon by which two or more particles share correlated properties through some instantaneous link, is tricky business. The quantum-mechanical bond entangling two particles is so delicate, it can be broken by any number of outside perturbations. Try entangling three particles, and the system becomes just that much more vulnerable to interference. Nevertheless, physicists strive to entangle ever larger systems, with the ultimate goal of harnessing quantum effects in large numbers of particles for computation, communication, or ultraprecise measurements....

The Department of Energy is taking a fresh look at a tough research problem that has baffled experts for more than a decade: developing a low-cost alternative to jet fuel. The search began around 2010, initially pushed by the Department of Defense’s concerns about the United States’ reliance on imported oil. More recently, airlines have raised the question themselves. They’re facing potential restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from jet airliners and the lack of a near-term, electricity-fueled replacement for their heavy planes....

Let’s review. First there was the oxymoronic, and just plain moronic, creation science, which says that biblical creation, not evolution, accounts for all life on earth. Creation science begat the more subtle intelligent design (ID), which holds that life is too complex to have evolved naturally–an intelligent designer (identity a secret, but it rhymes with Todd) must have done it, producing wonders of nature like the flagellum, that whippy tail some bacteria have, and both Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston....

MANILA (Reuters) - Storm Fung-Wong churned towards Taiwan on Saturday after killing at least five people in the Philippines, and forcing some 200,000 people into temporary shelter, including in the capital Manila, to escape massive flooding. Most schools on the main island of Luzon remained closed for a second day as a huge mopping-up operation began. Some public offices have reopened. “Some of our things are buried in mud, it will take awhile to clean up,” a resident in Marikina City told Reuters while clearing up layers of mud and debris inside their residence....

Science is slowly coming into focus in the US presidential campaign. Although neither Republican Donald Trump nor Democrat Hillary Clinton has emphasized core research issues, the candidates — and their parties — are beginning to flesh out their positions on climate change, education, biomedical research and other topics that involve the scientific community. Trump’s pick of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as his running mate on July 15 signalled a sharp turn towards the Republican party’s conservative base....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A team of about 90 U.S. Marines and sailors headed to the Philippines on Sunday, part of a first wave of promised U.S. military assistance for relief efforts after a devastating typhoon killed at least 10,000 people, U.S. officials said.Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel this weekend ordered the U.S. military’s Pacific Command to assist with search and rescue operations and provide air support in the wake of super typhoon Haiyan, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded....

Dear EarthTalk: I imagine you’ve been down this road before, but what’s hot in the green-friendly sunscreen department nowadays?—Elaine Mayer, Ocean City, Md. Most of us assume that all we need do to prevent sunburns and skin cancer from exposure to the sun is to slather on any of the widely available sunscreens on the market today. But the non-profit Environmental Working Group (EWG) points out that this may not be the case, and that consumers should be careful about which sunscreens they trust for themselves and, even more important, for their kids....

Our legal system often fails to help either victim or offender. Years after a crime, victims may still suffer from post-traumatic stress. Offenders, too, can struggle after their release from prison; limited rehabilitation means that they often return to a life of crime. To help remedy these wrongs, proponents of “restorative justice” methods advocate for face-to-face meetings between victims and offenders. Victims who participate in such discussions with a perpetrator report feeling they can forgive their attacker, and offenders say they feel responsibility for their actions—a change in trajectory for both parties....

It has been a tough year for wildlife tourism. Last month the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden faced worldwide criticism when officials there were forced to kill Harambe the gorilla after a young child fell into the ape’s enclosure. A few weeks earlier a Yellowstone National Park bison calf was euthanized by rangers after tourists had handled it and put it in their car. And just last week authorities in Thailand uncovered gruesome evidence of abuse and wildlife trafficking at the world-famous Tiger Temple outside of Bangkok....

Sheril Pritchett can’t get out of her room. It’s not because of damage from Hurricane Florence. Her apartment in Fayetteville, N.C., was spared, somehow, from the historic storm that dumped 30 inches of rain in some parts of the state. She’s not stranded by her earlier hip replacements, either. Pritchett is bed-ridden by stress. She, like many in the path of Florence, lives in federally subsidized housing. The 59-year-old followed instructions to evacuate, shuttling 110 miles with her husband to the nearest hotel they could find....

A bizarre creature that looks like nothing alive on Earth today probably used its unique shape to collect drifting particles from the ocean to feed on, new research finds. Tribrachidium was a denizen of the shallow seas about 550 million years ago, during the late Ediacaran period. It looked like a disc with three tentaclelike arms protruding from its flat top. Oddly, Tribrachidium had three-fold symmetry, meaning three segments were mirror images of each other....

Detroit once had 1.85 million inhabitants. Now it has fewer than 740,000. Cleveland and St. Louis, too, are half the size they were in 1950. Across the Atlantic, Liverpool and Leipzig are also dramatically smaller. When so many cities are booming, why are some trapped in decline? Cities naturally rise and fall as technologies change. Detroit and the other cities of the Great Lakes established themselves as agricultural transport hubs before the Civil War....

Kate and Dan met on the job in Boston, when they were in their early 20s. He thought she was attractive; she thought he was an arrogant jerk. At a work party, it came out that both had lost a parent in recent years, and a mutual feeling of “you must really get me” washed over them. A few years later, when they both found themselves in New York and single, the friendship ramped way up, into multiple-phone-calls-per-day, soul-baring, belly-laughing territory....

IF SOMEONE SHOWED you a caricature of Richard Nixon—a man’s face with oversize shaggy eyebrows, a bulbous nose and pronounced jowls—you would probably recognize the former president immediately, even though the drawing is not true to life. A cartoonist creates such a sketch by taking the average of many male faces and subtracting it from Nixon’s face, then amplifying those distinctive differences. To an observer, the result looks more like Nixon than Nixon himself....

Kristina Trotta was working for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in Miami in 2014 when she and her colleagues were called into a staff meeting. “We were told by the regional director that we were no longer supposed to say ‘global warming,’ ‘climate change’ or ‘sea level rise,’” says Trotta, who works on coral reef conservation. “We were finally told we are the governor’s agency and this is what the governor wants, and so this is what we’re going to do....

The evolution of human language was once thought to have hinged on changes to a single gene that were so beneficial that they raced through ancient human populations. But an analysis now suggests that this gene, FOXP2, did not undergo changes in Homo sapiens’ recent history after all—and that previous findings might simply have been false signals. “The situation’s a lot more complicated than the very clean story that has been making it into textbooks all this time,” says Elizabeth Atkinson, a population geneticist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the paper, which was published on August 2 in Cell....

Dear EarthTalk: I’m a musician and am curious about what the guitar industry is doing to ensure that the wood it uses is not destroying forests. – Chris Wiedemann, Ronkonkoma, NY Though it has not received a lot of press to date, the industry is on the case—in part for the sake of its own survival, and thanks to the hard work of a handful of green groups, guitar makers and wood suppliers....

For much of the past few decades motor vehicle crashes were the most common cause of death from injury—the leading cause of death in general—among children, teenagers and young adults in the U.S. But now a new analysis shows that, in recent years, guns have overtaken automotive crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death among people ages one through 24. The switchover, which happened in 2017, stems from both a reduction in vehicle-related deaths and a grim uptick in gun-related fatalities....

In the U.S., it is a given that those who are good at what they do earn status—respect, prestige, admiration. Being nice comes second. But that is not true everywhere. Different cultures have different values, and to climb the social ladder, you have to embody those values. In a recent paper in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Carlos Torelli, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota, compared the influence of individualism and collectivism on notions of status....

We have heard for years that planting trees can help save the world from global warming. That mantra was mostly a statement of faith, however. Now the data finally exist to show that if the right species of trees are planted in the right soil types across the planet, the emerging forests could capture 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the next 40 to 100 years. That’s two thirds of all the CO2 humans have generated since the industrial revolution....