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Once large enough to be mistaken for terrorist bombs, portable air pollution monitors are now being shrunk into smaller and smaller wearable devices that can be easily dispatched for environmental detective work: Is black carbon soot emitted by school buses contributing not just to warming global temperatures, but raising childhood asthma rates, too? These new pocket-size sensors could provide more practical and powerful detection of such potential public health risks....

Most people equate global warming with the atmosphere, but detailed mapping shows that many regions of the world’s oceans are heating up, too. Data compiled and plotted by Marinexplore in Sunnyvale, Calif., show that sea-surface temperatures across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans are up by about 1 degree Celsius and as much as 2 degrees C in certain spots (see map below). The warming is not uniform, and parts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica have actually cooled....

The best new technology of the past year wasn’t some phone or an app. Believe it or not, it was a new kind of USB cable. Now, before you suspect that I’ve inhaled a bit too much of that new-tablet smell, consider: The new cable, called USB Type-C (or USB-C), is the same on both ends, so you never have to fiddle with it. The connector is also identical on both sides—there’s no upside down....

Origins: How the Nine Months before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives by Annie Murphy Paul. Free Press, 2010 Does your birth month have an impact on your mental health? The startling answer seems to be yes. “Schizophrenics are about 10 percent more likely than the rest of the population to have been born in late winter and early spring,” says journalist Annie Murphy Paul in Origins: How the Nine Months before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives....

California’s sevenfold increase in autism cannot be explained by changes in doctors’ diagnoses and most likely is due to environmental exposures, University of California scientists reported Thursday. The scientists who authored the new study advocate a nationwide shift in autism research to focus on potential factors in the environment that babies and fetuses are exposed to, including pesticides, viruses and chemicals in household products. “It’s time to start looking for the environmental culprits responsible for the remarkable increase in the rate of autism in California,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, an epidemiology professor at University of California, Davis who led the study....

President Barack Obama has downsized the country’s nuclear arsenal, helped to negotiate a deal to halt Iran’s nuclear-weapons program and led a global initiative to secure radioactive materials. But Obama’s legacy on nuclear issues remains uncertain as he prepares for a major global summit this week on nuclear terrorism. The meeting, which begins in Washington DC on March 31, has taken on new significance in light of revelations that operatives of the Islamist extremist group ISIS may have been targeting nuclear facilities in Belgium....

Alberta’s $57 million carbon-cutting program is failing, according to the latest report from the Canadian province’s auditor-general, Merwan Saher. Like many such programs around the world, it includes an emissions trading scheme, which allows polluters to meet their emissions reductions targets by buying carbon offsets from a selection of approved projects. The offsets are supposed to be real, measurable and provable. But the report claims that the province, despite earlier warnings, has not improved its regulatory structure—and calls the emissions estimates and the offsets themselves into question....

The people most threatened by global warming are those who live in low-lying areas near the seashore. In this puzzle, you are going to try to protect as much of the fictitious (but representative) Whit Island as possible. Whit at its highest point is only 10 feet above sea level but the previous government had ignored the issue until an unusual storm swept several houses into the sea—and at the next election, the government, as well....

BROWN DWARFS In “Not Quite Stars,” by Katelyn Allers, the diagram “A Guide to Brown Dwarfs” states that these objects are “at least” 13 Jupiter masses. Yet it shows one brown dwarf that is eight Jupiter masses and another that is between three and 10. Meanwhile the main text refers to “planetary-mass brown dwarfs” that are less than 13 Jupiter masses. I thought the definition of brown dwarfs precluded Jupiter masses below about 13—and that the process of their formation would not produce objects below a certain mass....

The Trump administration’s latest National Preparedness Report, which describes the greatest threats and hazards to the country, says nothing about climate change, drought or sea-level rise. The 2019 report is the eighth annual summary of U.S. vulnerability to threats such as disasters and terrorism but the first to eschew the word “climate,” except for one reference to “school climate” in a section on preventing school violence. “Drought" and “sea-level rise” also are absent, even though the report notes the devastating California wildfires of 2018, which killed 100 people, were widely blamed on a decadelong drought that turned the state’s forests into tinderboxes....

The world could get a glimpse of a futuristic transportation system in which people get around in self-driving electric taxis as soon as next year. General Motors Co. and Lyft Inc. will start testing self-driving taxis with real customers within a year in a pilot program that could include electric vehicles, a Lyft executive told The Wall Street Journal. Those looking to cut carbon emissions from transportation have called the combination a “best case scenario” that could reduce pollution per mile by as much as 94 percent by 2030, according to a Nature Climate Change paper last year (ClimateWire, July 7, 2015)....

Physicist Giovanni Battista Amiciplaced a drop of liquid on a specimen in his Florence laboratory, improving the quality of the image seen through his microscope’s eyepiece. Now, 165 years later, the global semiconductor industry is just getting around to adopting Amici’s innovative technique. The decision to baptize chips under a thin liquid stratum will allow the making of circuits with features that measure the breadth of a virus. Such a retro solution–the 19th century meets the 21st–also serves as a fitting commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the semiconductor industry’s most influential technical paper, a treatise by Intel co-founder Gordon E....

The Smithsonian’s exhibition of the first jumping spider to survive the trip to space has turned out to be short lived: The arachnid astronaut died just days after going on display. “It is with sadness that we announce the death of Nefertiti, the ‘Spidernaut,’” the staff at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. wrote on Facebook Monday (Dec. 3). The “Johnson Jumper” (“Phidippus johnsoni”) spider was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in July as the subject of a student-initiated science experiment....

In the past year the climate in the Arctic has at times bordered on the absurd. Temperatures were 30 to 50 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some places during the recent Christmas week. Through November the area of ice-covered ocean in the region reached a record low in seven of 11 months—an unprecedented stretch. More important, perhaps, the difference between Arctic temperatures and those across the midlatitudes of North America, Europe and Asia during 2016 was the smallest ever seen....

Hospitals and medical devices in the U.S. are extremely vulnerable to the type of massive cyber attack that tore through more than 150 countries Friday, and some health care providers here may have already been—or soon will be—hit, cybersecurity analysts warn. The attack relied on a type of malicious software called ransomware, which keeps users from accessing their computer systems until they pay a ransom. The pernicious new strain, aptly named WannaCry, froze or slowed business and health care computer systems around the world, including several within the U....

A fire anywhere is cause for concern, but a fire at a fertilizer plant is a potential catastrophe. That’s because ammonium nitrate, a chemical commonly used in agricultural fertilizers, is a highly explosive compound, as shown by the massive fireball at a fertilizer plant in the town of West, Texas, Wednesday (April 17). Nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium are essential plant nutrients, and fertilizers are graded by the amounts of these elements the fertilizers contain, also called their “NPK rating” (from those elements’ abbreviations on the periodic table)....

Over the past two decades, the massive platforms of floating ice that dot the coast of Antarctica have been thinning and doing so at an increasing rate, likely at least in part because of global warming. Scientists are worried about its implications for significant sea level rise. The ice shelves—some of which are larger than California and tens to hundreds of yards thick—are the linchpins of the Antarctic ice sheet system, holding back the millions of cubic miles of ice contained in the glaciers that flow into them, like doorstops....

When German soccer enthusiast Katzn Bärga touched down in Brazil on Sunday, after 18 long months of anticipation, authorities across the nation were scrambling to make final preparations for the start of one of the largest and most widely televised sporting events on the globe. Now, tens of thousands of international visitors are making their way to the country’s Emerald Coast to attend the opening match of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in São Paulo, a city that was in the tight grip of a drought-induced water crisis barely one month ago....

At least, that possibility is feared by Claudio Maccone, a space scientist at Italy’s National Institute for Astrophysics. He is also a member of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA), which aired his concerns—and potential solutions—at a meeting held via teleconference on March 25. Maccone’s preferred approach to preserving the far side’s sanctity would be a so-called protected antipode circle, or PAC, a circular piece of terrain measuring roughly 1,820 kilometers in diameter in that hemisphere....

Columbia University glaciologist Alexandra Boghosian spent two years studying a meltwater river on Greenland’s Petermann Ice Shelf. She suspected the river ended in a waterfall like the one that cascades off the Nansen Ice Shelf in Antarctica, potentially keeping water from accumulating in melt ponds that can damage the ice. Instead Boghosian and her team discovered a new phenomenon: a deep-cut river channel that could contribute to future ice-calving events and accelerate sea-level rise....