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In the battle for the thermostat, preferences often fall along gender lines. But the instigator of the conflict is often the building itself, and better accounting for the unique temperature needs of women could lead to an armistice while saving energy, according to new research. Residential and office building energy consumption accounts for 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and for decades, engineers calibrated these buildings for men to make comfortable indoor environments....

High in the Russian Arctic, in the chilly waters straddling the Kara and Laptev, an 84-billion-ton island ice cap is projectile vomiting into the sea. Scientists say it could hold useful clues about what to expect as the world continues to warm. The Vavilov Ice Cap, nestled in Russia’s Severnaya Zemlya archipelago, suddenly started to surge forward in 2013. This is not an uncommon event for glaciers — every so often, pressure will build up behind the ice and cause it to temporarily slip forward....

Touch is perhaps the most intimate of the senses. When you grasp or brush against an object—anything from an outstretched hand to a leather-bound book—you are physically as close to it as you can possibly be. At that moment, specialized skin cells convey a wealth of information, such as shape, texture, size, and weight. Yet when you stop touching that object, much of that information appears to fade away rather quickly....

$54.5 million Amount Mitt Romney has raised for his presidential campaign as of Jan. 31, including super PAC funding $44.3 million Amount Barack Obama has raised for his reelection as of Jan. 31, including super PAC funding $30.5 million Amount the National Cancer Institute spent in 2010 on esophageal cancer research $19.6 million Amount the National Science Foundation requested in 2011 for the Gemini Observatory, among the most powerful telescopes in the world $18 million What the NSF spent in 2010 to fund the Large Hadron Collider $14 million Estimated amount the National Institutes of Health spent in 2011 funding gene therapy clinical trials COMMENT AT ScientificAmerican....

Global emissions are expected to keep climbing despite promises from almost 200 nations to address climate change, propelling temperatures upward and threatening to shatter the threshold of 2 degrees Celsius that scientists say would invite dramatic changes to ecology and the economy. The 10th Emissions Gap Report by the U.N. Environment Programme, released today, warned that there’s “no sign” greenhouse gases will hit their zenith anytime soon. It arrived a day after the World Meteorological Organization revealed record-high concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere....

A recent U.N. climate report gives key validation to lawsuits that prod fossil fuel companies to pay for climate damages and governments to move more aggressively on climate mitigation. The landmark report last week from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change credits this trend of climate litigation with influencing “the outcome and ambition of climate governance.” The IPCC report is by the world’s leading climate scientists and focuses on how society can curb greenhouse gas emissions and stem the worst effects of global warming....

Capturing methane emissions from coal mines around the world could significantly reduce the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, as well as lead to improvements in mine safety and local air quality, according to a report by the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). Emissions from fossil fuel consumption account for the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions, but extraction of oil, natural gas and coal also emits greenhouse gases, particularly methane that frequently mingles within coal seams or oil and gas deposits....

A decade ago, biologists and natural historians around the world launched ambitious goals to create inventories of our planet’s biodiversity. After all, they said, you can’t save what you don’t know exists. Even some high estimates suggest that only a quarter of Earth’s species have been described by science, raising concerns about the big picture amidst rising extinction rates. As these projects have crept along with the painstaking work of collecting and describing species, a new line of attack has emerged for capturing the DNA of Earth’s unknown species for cataloguing purposes: pull it out of thin air....

A biochemical produced in the brain called oxytocin has entered popular culture in recent years as the “love,” “cuddle” or “bonding” hormone. That’s a lot to choose from. Oxytocin plays a role in producing contractions at childbirth and in helping in lactation, but we’ve known that for more than a century. Experiments in the 1990s showed that it was instrumental in leading prairie voles, known for their monogamous behavior, to pick a lifelong mate....

Adapted from What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, by Jonathan Balcombe, by arrangement with Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC (US), Oneworld (UK), United Sky New Media Co. Ltd. (China), Eidos Publishing (Korea) and Hakuyosha Publishing Co., Ltd. (Japan). Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Balcombe. While diving off the Micronesian archipelago of Pulau, evolutionary biologist Giacomo Bernardi witnessed something unusual and was lucky enough to capture it on film....

Dear EarthTalk: I couldn’t believe my ears: “genetically engineered mosquitoes?” Why on Earth would they be created? And I understand there are plans to release them into the wild? — Marissa Abingdon, Sumter, SC Yes it’s true, genetically engineered mosquitoes, which were bred in the lab to transmit a gene during the reproductive process that kills their offspring, have already been used on an experimental basis in three countries—the Cayman Islands, Malaysia and Brazil—to counteract the quickly spreading mosquito-borne viral infection dengue fever....

By Alla KatsnelsonDifferent communities of Jews around the world share more than just religious or cultural practices–they also have strong genetic commonalities, according to the largest genetic analysis of Jewish people to date.But the study also found strong genetic ties to non-Jewish groups, with the closest genetic neighbors on the European side being Italians, and on the Middle Eastern side the Druze, Bedouin and Palestinians.Researchers in New York and Tel Aviv conducted a genome-wide analysis on 237 individuals from seven well-established Jewish communities around the world, hailing from Iran, Iraq, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Syria and eastern Europe....

Linux and Android are two closely linked open-source projects, but they’ve been as notable for how distant they are from each other–until yesterday.That’s when Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, released a version of the operating system core that bridges between the two worlds. Version 3.3 of the Linux kernel is the beginning of the end of isolation between these two projects.Down under the covers, every Android phone is a Linux phone....

Astronomers have detected eight new sources of very high-energy gamma rays in the Milky Way. A paper published in the current issue of the journal Science describes the novel finds, two of which may represent a new class of cosmic-ray source. Pulsars and supernovae are two of the myriad phenomena in our galaxy that can accelerate electrons or nuclei to produce high-energy emissions. Felix Aharonian of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany and his colleagues used the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) of four telescopes in Namibia, Africa, to search the central part of the Milky Way....

The good news: as we get older, we become more ambidextrous. The bad news: this new skill develops because the performance of our dominant hand declines so drastically. Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany and the California Institute of Technology tested 60 volunteers who described themselves as right-handed. The older the subjects were, the less successful they were at motor performance tests using their dominant hand. Left-hand performance did not deteriorate as drastically with age....

SILVER SPRING, Md.—Nestled inside a generic-looking office building here in suburban Maryland, down the hall from cable-provider Comcast, sits the largest blood serum repository in the world. Seven freezers, each roughly the size of a high school basketball court, are stacked high with row upon row of small cardboard boxes containing tubes of yellow or pinkish blood serum, a liquid rich in antibodies and proteins, but devoid of cells. The freezers hover at –30 degrees Celsius—cold enough to make my pen dry up and to require that workers wear protective jumpsuits, hats, gloves and face masks....

On an overcast late April day in Newark, N.J., after more than a year of pandemic suffering, some 2,000 people queued up at a public college campus to start healing. Inside a hangar-style tennis facility at the New Jersey Institute of Technology that had been converted into a mass vaccination site, they came face to face with one of the most remarkable biomedical achievements in history: a safe and highly effective COVID vaccine designed and tested in a 10-month sprint in 2020....

A massive burst of solar wind that erupted from the sun Tuesday is expected to deliver only a “glancing blow” to the Earth’s vulnerable magnetic field, NASA officials said yesterday. But it will preview what some experts call a potentially existential threat to the power grids of the United States and other nations, and the populations that depend on them. Antti Pulkkinen, who leads NASA’s “Solar Shield” satellite-based detection system at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said the cloud of ionized particles from Tuesday’s violent “coronal mass ejection” will largely miss Earth, giving some North American residents a glimpse of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, this weekend....

Someday, packing for a trip might be as simple as stowing a spray can of colloidal polymer mix for making your own spray-on clothes. Whether it’s a T-shirt or evening attire, spray-on fabric is a novel way to make a variety of light-use fabrics. British fashion designer Manel Torres dreamed up the idea after attending a wedding and watching people spray each other with Silly String, filaments of plastic propelled in liquid form from an aerosol can....

The late neuroscientist Paul Bach-Y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that “we see with our brains not our eyes.” Now a noninvasive device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of seeing for the visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue’s surface to send light signals to the brain. First demonstrated in 2003 by neuroscientists at Middleton, Wis.–based Wicab (a company co-founded by Bach-y-Rita), the device could finally be ready for sale at the end of the year....