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A nine-month, $3.8-billion effort to end the longest blackout in U.S. history has restored power to much of Puerto Rico. Unfortunately though, this year’s Atlantic hurricane season is underway and the still-fragile electrical grid is unlikely to fare any better when the next major storm hits. As Puerto Rico’s government and state-owned utility company consider their options for a major redesign of the grid’s power generation, transmission and distribution systems over the next decade, many residents see neighborhood microgrids powered by renewable energy sources as their best option for weathering storms in the more immediate future....

In the Early Cretaceous period, just over 100 million years ago, Australia lay alongside Antarctica, which straddled the South Pole as it does today. Australia’s southeastern corner, now the state of Victoria, lay well inside the Antarctic Circle. At that time, the region hosted an assemblage of animals and plants that lived under climate conditions having no modern analogue. The average temperature appears to have ranged from frigid to low temperate....

On a hot August day in 2005 my team and I were out hunting for fish fossils in the tall, grassy paddocks of Gogo Station, a vast cattle ranch located in the heart of northwestern Australia. Today the arid region is hardly suitable for aquatic creatures. But some 375 million years ago, during the Late Devonian period, a shallow sea covered the area and Gogo was home to an enormous tropical reef that teemed with marine life, including a plethora of primitive fishes....

If there is any benefit to be salvaged from the disastrous overfishing of the bluefin tuna (see “The Bluefin in Peril,” by Richard Ellis), it’s the spotlight that it shines on the plundering of the world’s marine life. It has been 16 years since the demand for cod led to the collapse of the once superabundant cod fisheries in the North Atlantic off Newfoundland. Disappearing with them were some 40,000 jobs....

Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano erupted beginning Sunday (Dec. 20) night local time, with dramatic lava fountains and huge puffs of gas and steam being launched from the summit crater called Halemaʻumaʻu, the Hawaii Volcano Observatory (HVO), part of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), reported. Though the shield volcano is one of Earth’s most active volcanoes, constantly spewing lava from its fissures, the recent eruption is much more dramatic than the “background” streams of lava that consistently flow from volcanic cracks....

When Microsoft launched its research labs in 1991, the personal computer was just beginning to blossom into a worldwide phenomenon, thanks in no small part to Windows. The company’s head count had swelled above 8,000 employees, global sales were about $1.8 billion and its biggest battleground was the desktop. Fast-forward to 2014, and the era that spawned Microsoft Research seems quaint by comparison. Microsoft now sells more than $77 billion in products and services annually, boasts an international workforce of 99,000 and has poured its considerable resources into dozens of different technologies—tablets, smartphones, video game systems and cloud storage, to name a few—with varying degrees of success....

How can we make the perfect balance between positive and negative thoughts? That was a trick question. The way to a healthy mental experience is not to control our thoughts. If we try to manipulate our thoughts, we’re being dishonest with ourselves. Not only that but we’d also be fighting an exhausting battle, since the mind has a pretty strong will of its own. Trying to put all of our inner experiences in rose-colored boxes often either doesn’t work or doesn’t last very long....

Flooding from Hurricane Joaquin will impact areas from South Carolina to Massachusetts regardless of whether it makes landfall or if the center stays out to sea. People should not let their guard down due to a shifting track of the hurricane as the risk to lives and property in this complex situation remains high. A copious amount of moisture will unload very heavy rainfall along parts of the Atlantic Seaboard and the Appalachians into early next week....

Mercedes Diaz tramps into a muddy soybean field and runs her brightly manicured fingers through the limbs of dozens of knee-high plants. As she checks the stems, pods and leaves, she rattles off a list of possible maladies under her breath: pod borers, frogeye leaf spot, white mold. Diaz spots a tangle of mottled leaves and shouts, “SDS!”—signaling sudden death syndrome. She plucks one of the leaves and hands it to me....

Nestlé is committed to enhancing the quality of consumers’ lives through nutritional products that promote health and wellness. It is with this mindset that the company actively pursues research on the human microbiome (the collection of microorganisms that inhabit specific parts of the human body) with the aim to develop functional products that provide microbial-mediated health benefits (see Fig. 1). Nestlé pioneered research on beneficial microorganisms – so called ‘probiotics’, i....

For as long as she can remember, Kay Tye has wondered why she feels the way she does. Rather than just dabble in theories of the mind, however, Tye has long wanted to know what was happening in the brain. In college in the early 2000s, she could not find a class that spelled out how electrical impulses coursing through the brain’s trillions of connections could give rise to feelings. “There wasn’t the neuroscience course I wanted to take,” says Tye, who now heads a lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif....

With the backdrop of massive peat land fires sending carbon into the atmosphere and the fast-approaching U.N. climate talks, environmental advocates expect today’s visit between Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and President Obama to touch on climate change and deforestation challenges. The meeting isn’t the two leaders’ first but is the first state visit for the Indonesian president, who was elected a year ago. Activists hope Jokowi will go beyond a recent announcement to control peat fires and reform land use policies, although there is some skepticism that other topics will overtake the agenda....

Editor’s Note (12/21/21): This article is being showcased in a special collection about equity in health care that was made possible by the support of Takeda Pharmaceuticals. The article was published independently and without sponsorship. The past few days have been awash with news of the emergence of the latest concerning variant of the virus behind COVID-19, which the World Health Organization has dubbed Omicron. Scientists detected this new variant through genomic surveillance in South Africa, but in a quickly evolving pandemic we still don’t know where it originated, and we still don’t know how important Omicron will be....

A new online petition asks the White House to repeal budget cuts that have spurred NASA to suspend many of its education and public-outreach efforts. The petition was created on Friday (March 22), the same day that NASA issued two internal memos outlining how outreach activities are being scaled back as a result of sequestration, the set of across-the-board federal cuts that took effect March 1. The memos began circulating outside the agency Friday as well....

By Alister Doyle Sea ice off Antarctica and in the Arctic is at record lows for this time of year after declining by twice the size of Alaska in a sign of rising global temperatures, climate scientists say. Against a trend of global warming and a steady retreat of ice at earth’s northern tip, ice floating on the Southern Ocean off Antarctica has tended to expand in recent years. But now it is shrinking at both ends of the planet, a development alarming scientists and to which a build-up of man-made greenhouse gases, an El Nino weather event that this year unlocked heat from the Pacific Ocean and freak natural swings may all be contributing....

Your beliefs about the way you think can shape your life in surprising ways. A spate of recent findings suggest that targeting such metacognition can help relieve mood and anxiety disorders, and it may even reduce symptoms of psychosis. Metacognition often takes the form of a value judgment about one’s thoughts, such as “It’s bad that I overanalyze everything.” Research has shown that these metacognitive beliefs can play an important role in obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression and generalized anxiety disorder, among others....

Women exposed to high levels of flame retardants take substantially longer to get pregnant, indicating for the first time that the widespread chemicals may affect human fertility, according to a study published Tuesday. Furniture cushions, carpet padding and other household items contain hormone-disrupting flame retardants called polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs. Two of the most widely used compounds have been banned in the United States since 2004, but they remain ubiquitous in the environment, inside homes and in the food supply....

Jupiter’s icy moon Europa is one of the most tantalizing worlds for exploration—which is why NASA scientists are deep in the process of designing Europa Clipper, a spacecraft meant to crack its secrets. Europa Clipper will launch as soon as 2023, then trek out to the Jupiter system for about 40 close passes over the mysterious icy moon. Once it arrives, the spacecraft will gather vital information about the moon’s geology, composition and hidden interior ocean....

A new self-destructing battery can power a simple electronic device for up to 15 minutes and then dissolve in water. It could pave the way for so-called transient power sources for scientific instruments or tools of espionage, according to a new study. Engineers have developed a novel variety of battery capable of powering a simple electronic device, such as a four-function calculator, and then dissolving in water in half an hour....

That said, gnawing concerns persist when it comes to artificially enhancing intelligence. Geneticists and neuroscientists have made great strides in understanding which genes, brain structures and neurochemicals might be altered artificially to increase intelligence. The fear this prospect brings is that a nation of achievers will discard hard work and turn to prescriptions to get ahead. Enhancing intelligence is not science fiction. Many smart drugs are in clinical trials and could be on the market in less than five years....