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Can we save the earth one stir-fry at a time? I was certainly dubious when I first saw the book, Cool Cuisine: Taking the Bite Out of Global Warming. Still, the lush cover photography of a verdant table setting and a bowl of farm-fresh eggs drew me in. As I flipped through the pages, I was a bit surprised to see they were packed with clean, colorful graphics and sidebars explaining everything from the atmospheric carbon cycle to the role of bees in agriculture and step-by-step instructions for successful composting....

It’s one of the few government programs most taxpayers love. Stocking America’s waterways with fish for anglers has a persistent Norman Rockwell kind of appeal, based on the idea that, with a little help, any lake or stream can be a place where your average kid (or grown-up) can toss out a line and just maybe reel in dinner. Fish stocking is also the basis for a recreational fishing economy worth $25....

“Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President.” “FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead of Apparent Murder-Suicide.” “Rush Reveals Michelle’s Perverted Past After She Dumps on Trump.” Those headlines didn’t come from the New York Times or CNN; they were likely written by teenagers in Macedonia. Those fake news stories were written as clickbait, designed to draw readers to fake-news sites, where the Balkan teens made money by selling ads....

THE HAGUE(Reuters) - Unusually warm western Pacific waters linked to global warming may be the paradoxical cause of a bone-chilling winter in parts of the United States this year, a scientific study said on Thursday. The theory contrasts with other experts’ views, including that the freeze was simply a freak natural event or that it was linked to a thawing of the Arctic in recent years that sent a blast of cold air south....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

1972 Tectonic Dump “A speculative but intriguing scheme for disposing of man-made solid wastes has been put forward by two investigators at the University of Washington. The plan would take advantage of regions called subduction sinks, where sedimentary material is being drawn downward into the earth’s mantle as a consequence of seafloor spreading. A hypothetical disposal system would consist of three stages: collection, compaction of waste into blocks and its sea transportation to tectonic sinks....

How does food irradiation work? Is it safe? Sam Beattie, a food science professor at Iowa State University, zaps a reply (as told to Jordan Lite): Irradiation treatments expose food to a dose of ionizing radiation, which disrupts the DNA or proteins of bacteria that make people ill. Anytime you break bonds in chemicals you are bound to introduce changes, so it is critical that those alterations do not impart any toxicological effects to the food....

I’ve never been good at waiting around for something to do. If work slackens slightly, I volunteer for new projects that I will find challenging—and the way I race down the hall from one task to the next is the subject of a lot of good-natured office humor. My shoulder bag is always stuffed with reading material, to ward off idle moments during the train ride home. Truth is, I just really, really hate being bored....

Editor’s note: This interview with Bill Gates was conducted in 2014. With an endowment of $40 billion (give or take), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has the financial heft to make dramatic changes in hundreds of millions of people’s lives around the world. But how does the organization decide which causes and institutions to fund? Bill Gates, its co-founder and co-chair, has a well-established knack for sifting through complex data sets to find the right pathways for making progress around the globe in health, education and economic development....

In squad car number 6540, Cunningham and I reach the area that his report has flagged. We are scouting for would-be burglars in general—“I’m looking for people who look like they don’t have a place to go,” Cunningham explains—and one suspect in particular: a man named Devin who may be behind a recent spate of break-ins in the area. Cunningham pulls up Devin’s picture on a dashboard-mounted touch screen. We roll slowly into the parking lot of one of the buildings....

It starts with an age-old question: If a man pulls out before ejaculating, can a woman still get pregnant? In bedrooms, basements and the backs of cars worldwide, millions of sexually active humans make choices (or regret them) based on what should be foundational fertility knowledge. Most trusted sources say the answer is yes—it is unlikely but possible that pregnancy will occur, so don’t risk it. Dig deeper, though, and it quickly becomes unclear exactly where the risk is coming from....

BERKELEY, Calif. – In 2007, officials from this famously liberal city shut off the electricity to an artists space known as the Shipyard. That action, which forced the artists there to seek a new way to power their flamethrowers, is the origin story of a company that now produces what it says is the world’s only carbon-negative power source. Located in one of the grittiest areas of town, where train tracks, garbage, and broken down cars are far more prevalent than the hippies Berkeley is famous for, All Power Labs has set up shop inside the Shipyard....

Many of us learned in high school chemistry that the electrons around an atomic nucleus occupy different energy levels. The low-energy levels are known as the inner electron shells, and the highest-energy level forms the outer shell. Chemical bonds, we were told, form only when atoms share or exchange electrons in their outermost shells. But a chemist may have found a loophole in that familiar rule of bonding. Under very high pressures, it appears, electrons in the atom’s inner shells can also take part in chemical bonds....

Thousands of black-and-white aerial photographs of Greenland taken between 1978 and 1987 are helping scientists reconstruct a 110-year-long record of ice loss in this region. A new study published in Nature yesterday that used the photographs found that the Greenland ice sheet lost about 9,000 gigatons of ice between 1900 and 2010 and that the rate has accelerated in recent years. The reduction in the ice mass has contributed to global average sea-level rise of 25 millimeters....

Dear EarthTalk: What is “vertical farming” and how is it better for the environment? —Jonathan Salzman, New York City “Vertical farming” is a term coined by Columbia University professor of environmental health and microbiology Dickson Despommier to describe the concept of growing large amounts of food in urban high-rise buildings—or so-called “farmscrapers.” According to the vision first developed in 1999 by Despommier and his students, a 30-story building built on one city block and engineered to maximize year-round agricultural yield—thanks largely to artificial lighting and advanced hydroponic and aeroponic growing techniques—could feed tens of thousands of people....

Immigration is often tied in the popular imagination to poverty—“the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” as poet Emma Lazarus wrote in 1883 to honor the Statue of Liberty. Data, however, show this notion to be a caricature. In this plot of the 50 largest migration flows, few of the poorest people leave home, and when they do they usually go to middle-income nations. Research suggests that is because they do not have the resources or education to survive in the richest countries....

Hurricane Sandy decimated coastal communities. Now what? The Far Reach of Our Coasts — and Coastal Problems While less than 10 percent of U.S. land area is coastline (excluding Alaska),“123.3 million people … or 39 percent of the nation’s population lived in” shoreline counties in 2010,according to the federal government. Put differently, our coasts,“substantially more crowded than the U.S. as a whole,”have apopulation densitymore than six times that of inland counties....

On May 4, three-and-a-half years into its mission, NASA’s InSight lander registered the largest “marsquake” ever detected. The magnitude 5.0 quake was nearly 10 times more powerful than the previous record-holding Red Planet temblor, reaching the upper limits of what NASA geologists had dreamed of finding on Mars. And it may prove to be the mission’s swan song. Less than two weeks after the record-shattering quake, NASA announced that InSight is in trouble—not from seismic activity but from a slowly accumulating layer of rust-red dust on its solar panels....

A giant database on the health risks of nearly 10,000 chemicals will make it easier to predict the toxicity of tens of thousands of consumer products for which no data exist, say researchers. But a legal disagreement means they haven’t yet been able to make the database public, as they had hoped to do. “This has the potential to save millions of animals and reduce testing costs by hundreds of millions,” says Thomas Hartung, a toxicologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who led the team that created the database....

NASA’s huge supersonic parachute isn’t ready to land astronauts on Mars just yet. The 100-foot-wide (30 meters) chute—the biggest supersonic parachute ever deployed—was apparenty torn apart today (June 8) during the second flight test of NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) vehicle, which the space agency built as part of an ongoing effort to learn how to get superheavy payloads such as habitat modules down softly on the surface of Mars. “Chute deployed, but did not inflate....