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U.S. An estimated 34 trillion gallons of water—more than 50 million Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth—fell on Texas last August during Hurricane Harvey, according to a recent analysis. Scientists think the extreme event was 15 percent more intense than normal because of climate change. ANTARCTICA The diversity and numbers of species residing underneath the Ross Ice Shelf have greatly increased since 2009, scientists say. They hypothesize that climate change thinned the ice, letting in more light and increasing the growth of algae, which feeds diverse species....

Dear EarthTalk: What exactly are Asian carp, and why are they such a big problem lately?—Lori Roudebush, Portland, Ore. Seven species of carp native to Asia have been introduced into United States waters in recent decades, but it’s four in particular—bighead, black, grass and silver—that worry ecologists, biologists, fishers and policymakers alike. Introduced in the southeast to help control weeds and parasites in aquaculture operations, these fish soon spread up the Mississippi River system where they have been crowding out native fish populations not used to competing with such aggressive invaders....

Camera bugs love zoom lenses, but they tend to be too bulky for cell phones and many miniature digital cameras. A research team at the University of Central Florida (U.C.F.) led by optics professors Shin-Tson Wu and Hongwen Ren has developed zoom lenses that can be dramatically smaller than conventional zooms. Whereas traditional zoom lenses move sets of lens elements mechanically to adjust focal length (and therefore magnification), the group’s adaptive lenses alter focal length nearly instantaneously without changing the position of the lenses....

As a lifelong reader of Scientific American, I was tickled to discover a little over a year ago that the magazine had carried poetry in its earliest issues. Volume I, Number 1, for example, dated 28 August 1845, included a poem called “Attraction” that touched on gravity, magnetism and sexual allure. Within a few years, however, the magazine’s original publisher, Rufus Porter, sold Scientific American, and the new owners showed no interest in poetry....

Oregon regulators are studying how to design an economywide carbon cap-and-trade system that would be able to link with other similar programs in neighboring states and provinces. While a bill to actually implement a cap-and-trade system eluded state lawmakers in the legislative session that ended in March, they did direct the state Department of Environmental Quality to study “a market-based approach to controlling greenhouse gas emissions.” DEQ staff are beginning the study now and said Friday that they plan to start with the assumption that they would be linking markets with California, Quebec and other members of the Western Climate Initiative, the U....

When Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started up in 2008, particle physicists would not have dreamt of asking for something bigger until they got their US$5-billion machine to work. But with the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the LHC has fulfilled its original promise — and physicists are beginning to get excited about designing a machine that might one day succeed it: the Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC). “It’s only prudent to try to sketch a vision decades into the future,” says Michael Peskin, a theoretical physicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, who presented the VLHC concept to a US government advisory panel on 2 November....

Uncontrollable, explosive bouts of anger such a road rage might be the result of an earlier brain infection from the toxoplasmosis parasite, an organism found in cat feces, a new study finds. In the study of more than 350 adults, those with a psychiatric disorder called Intermittent Explosive Disorder, or IED, were twice as likely to have been infected by the toxoplasmosis parasite compared with healthy individuals with no psychiatric diagnosis....

PRIORITIZING POPULATION In “A Puzzle for the Planet,” Michael E. Webber discusses the need to integrate three key factors (energy, water and food) to make it possible to meet the needs of a growing population. A critical point is that we have to stabilize that population in the first place. As long as it continues to grow, all other efforts are merely stopgaps. AVI ORNSTEIN New Britain, Conn. WEBBER REPLIES: Population growth is indeed important, but it turns out that economic growth is a bigger deal: demand for food, energy and water are growing faster than population because people tend to demand more meat and electricity (both of which are water-intensive) as they are elevated out of poverty....

Superconductors are materials that shepherd electrons seamlessly from one place to another with zero resistance. Most have just one “lane”—but a newly discovered material can carry current racing in both directions at once. The material, β-Bi2Pd, is a thin film of crystalline bismuth and palladium. When shaped into a ring, it displays an unconventional ability to cycle current clockwise and counterclockwise simultaneously. Its developers say it could potentially play a role in building the next generation of quantum computers, machines that rely on quantum physics to perform vastly more calculations than contemporary computers can....

By Mark SchropeThe well blew out, the blowout preventer failed, and the drilling rig caught fire and eventually sank. Oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico at a staggering rate from the damaged riser that had attached the platform to the well. Nobody knew what to do, although engineers tried various measures to stem the flow, including a containment dome. Chemical dispersants to break up the oil were applied at one of the highest rates in history....

Bananas hanging on a tree or sitting in the produce section of the grocery store start out green, plenty hard and none too tasty. Over time, of course, they become softer and sweeter. The cause of fruit ripening is a natural form of a chemical synthesized to make PVC (polyvinyl chloride) piping and plastic bags—namely, a gaseous plant hormone called ethylene. For thousands of years, people have used various techniques to boost ethylene production even if they did not quite know it....

Despite having only been around for fewer than three years, the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 is perhaps the most studied and genetically sequenced pathogen in history. Disease surveillance teams around the world have uploaded millions of viral sequences to public databases that allow researchers to track how the virus spreads. A new computational model mined this unprecedented amount of data—more than 6.4 million SARS-CoV-2 sequences—to find patterns among the mutations that help a new viral strain spread throughout the world....

Television ads for erectile dysfunction, stroke or toenail fungus treatments have been called both a boon and a curse. Drugmakers assert that promoting their products makes patients aware of conditions they can then flag for their doctor. Yet every developed country except the U.S. and New Zealand prohibits such direct-to-consumer prescription drug ads. It is hard to see educational value in commercials on American TV that show radiant models relaxing before a tryst, accompanied by voice-overs that warn of possible side effects, including difficulty breathing and an unsafe drop in blood pressure....

With Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump talking about walling off the United States from Mexico, ecologists fear for the future of the delicate and surprisingly diverse ecosystems that span Mexico’s border with the southwestern United States. “The southwestern US and northwestern Mexico share their weather, rivers and wildlife,” says Sergio Avila-Villegas, a conservation scientist from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson. “The infrastructure on the border cuts through all that and divides a shared landscape in two....

U.S. teens are turning to vaping in record numbers, with rates climbing dramatically since 2017. The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has released its 2019 Monitoring the Future survey of eighth, 10th and 12th graders across the country, and the results indicate an alarming increase across all three age groups. When asked whether they had vaped in the last month, high school seniors reported about doubling their rates in the span of a year, going from 11 percent in 2017 to 20....

On August 1, 1966, the day psychiatrist Stuart Brown started his assistant professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, 25-year-old Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower on the Austin campus and shot 46 people. Whitman, an engineering student and a former U.S. Marine sharpshooter, was the last person anyone expected to go on a killing spree. After Brown was assigned as the state’s consulting psychiatrist to investigate the incident and later, when he interviewed 26 convicted Texas murderers for a pilot study, he discovered that most of the killers, including Whitman, shared two things in common: they were from abusive families, and they never played as kids....

(Credit:CBS)Verizon Wireless has begun selling information about its customers’ geographical locations, app usage, and Web browsing activities, a move that raises privacy questions and could brush up against federal wiretapping law.The company this month began offering reports to marketers showing what Verizon subscribers are doing on their phones and other mobile devices, including what iOS and Android apps are in use in which locations. Verizon says it may link the data to third-party databases with information about customers’ gender, age, and even details such as “sports enthusiast, frequent diner or pet owner....

Why does it feel so hard these days to make decisions? And, in the wake of the COVID pandemic, why do so many of those decisions leave us feeling guilty, whichever path we take? Most of us want to avoid guilt; we are motivated to act in a “prosocial” way, a way that benefits not just ourselves but others. But often, we have conflicting options with no clear and correct response....

For the first time, researchers have teleported a qutrit, a tripartite unit of quantum information. The independent results from two teams are an important advance for the field of quantum teleportation, which has long been limited to qubits—units of quantum information akin to the binary “bits” used in classical computing. These proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate that qutrits, which can carry more information and have greater resistance to noise than qubits, may be used in future quantum networks....

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Taller than the Statue of Liberty, the ochre rocket thundered into the sky around 1:47 A.M. ET, cleaving the darkness with a searing column of crackling fire and sending shudders through the ground near Cape Canaveral, Fla. Bound for the moon, it carried an uncrewed space capsule and a bounty of scientific payloads. But its most profound cargo is a psychic slice of the “American Dream”—a promise that, at least in spaceflight, the U....