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Congress is considering spending bills that would significantly cut funding for key climate change research by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2017. Among the losers: the oldest carbon dioxide observatories on the planet, the ability to track fossil fuel emissions in the United States and a program to study ocean acidification. “We are asking for a small amount of money to do all the right things,” said James Butler, director of global monitoring at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL)....

Have you ever sensed that someone might be watching you? You get a prickly feeling at the back of your neck and turn to see a stranger staring at you across the room. It sometimes seems that we can feel a person’s gaze as a physical sensation. And, from a single glance, we can tell a lot about a person, such as their moods, intentions and focus. Is their gaze dangerous, interesting or attractive?...

Parts of Siberia produced their highest fire-related emissions since the agency first began keeping tabs in 2003. Ditto for the western United States. Altogether, wildfires worldwide spewed about 1.76 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere. That’s not the highest on record, globally speaking. But it’s still a staggering amount. Comparatively, the entire world emitted around 10 billion metric tons of carbon this year (that’s the equivalent of about 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide) through the burning of fossil fuels (Climatewire, Nov....

American Electric Power Co. Inc. and Duke Energy Corp. joined other businesses and environmental groups today in announcing their unified support for provisions for protecting tropical forest in cap-and-trade legislation. The coalition reached an agreement [pdf] with two major facets. The groups support using 5 percent of valuable greenhouse gas emission allowances under the bill’s cap-and-trade system to prevent tropical deforestation and reduce international forest emissions. They also want companies to receive credits for tropical forest protection activities....

If you thought wireless Internet made life convenient, try wrapping your mind around wireless power. Researchers have successfully lit a 60-watt light bulb by transferring energy through the air from one specially designed copper coil to the bulb, which was attached to a second coil seven feet away [see image at right]. The ultimate goal: to shrink the coils and increase the distance between them so that a single base station emitting “WiTricity,” as the inventors refer to the effect, could power a roomful of rechargeable gadgets, each containing its own small coil....

Pieces from a mysterious board game that hasn’t been played for 1,500 years were discovered in a heavily looted 2,300-year-old tomb near Qingzhou City in China. There, archaeologists found a 14-face die made of animal tooth, 21 rectangular game pieces with numbers painted on them and a broken tile which was once part of a game board. The tile when reconstructed was “decorated with two eyes, which are surrounded by cloud-and-thunder patterns,” wrote the archaeologists in a report published recently in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics....

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine “Who told me to get out?” asked a diver, surfacing from a tank in which a whale named NOC lived. The beluga’s caretakers had heard what sounded like garbled phrases emanating from the enclosure before, and it suddenly dawned on them that the whale might be imitating the voices of his human handlers. The outbursts — described today in Current Biology and originally at a 1985 conference — began in 1984 and lasted for about four years, until NOC hit sexual maturity, says Sam Ridgway, a marine biologist at National Marine Mammal Foundation in San Diego, California....

Magazine issue closes are always hectic. We spend months working on each edition, but then for one week, roughly six weeks before publication, we have to triple-check each of the some 100 pages in the book and get them out the door in time to meet our monthly printer deadline. This close is different. As I write this letter, it’s 10 P.M. on Sunday, March 15. Last Tuesday our parent company, Springer Nature, told everyone in the New York City office that they could work from home because of the spread of coronavirus, and nearly everyone has availed themselves of the opportunity....

In the United States, treatments for hair loss are a $3.6 billion industry with products ranging from supplements to shampoos, laser-producing helmets, and even surgery. But do any of these treatments actually work? What Causes Hair Loss? Our hair grows in a cycle with three distinct phases. First, hair grows and gets longer in the anagen phase which can go on for several years. Then, during the ~10-day catagen phase, hair stops actively growing and separates from its follicle, which is what holds the hair in place beneath the skin....

Arctic ice is disappearing at some of the fastest rates in centuries as global temperatures rise. Now, scientists suggest that melting glaciers may, in turn, be influencing the Arctic climate. As glaciers melt and retreat, exposing more and more ice-free earth as they go, they can kick up clouds of dust into the atmosphere. New research suggests that these dust particles may strongly affect the formation of Arctic clouds, which have a major influence over the region’s temperatures and precipitation....

A pair of U.S. economists, William Nordhaus and Paul Romer, share the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for integrating climate change, and technological change, into macroeconomics, which deals with the behaviour of an economy as a whole. Nordhaus, at the University of Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, is the founding father of the study of climate change economics. Economic models he has developed since the 1990s are now widely used to weigh the costs and benefits of curbing greenhouse gas emissions against those of inaction....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI, Feb 3 (Reuters) - Florida wildlife officials, opening a new front in the war on invasive snakes, are recruiting the general public for “python patrols” that teach them how to identify and even capture some of the hissing, snapping reptiles. “We consider (Burmese pythons) established, which means the hope of removing them is pretty slim,” said Jenny Novak, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) biologist, during a recent training session with 20 volunteers in south Florida....

Over the counter homeopathic remedies sold in the US will now have to come with a warning that they are based on outdated theories ‘not accepted by most modern medical experts’ and that ‘there is no scientific evidence the product works’. Failure to do so will mean the makers of homeopathic remedies will risk running afoul of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The agency argues that unsupported health claims included in the marketing for some of these remedies are in breach of laws that prohibit deceptive advertising or labelling of over the counter drugs....

Memristor Made After nearly 40 years, scientists have constructed a new addition to the stable of circuit elements (inductors, capacitors and resistors). Called the memristor, or memory resistor, it is a nanometer-scale electric switch that “remembers” whether it is on or off after its power is turned off. It might become a useful tool for constructing nonvolatile computer memory or for packing transistors together more densely to make smaller chips. A Hewlett-Packard team crafted the device by inserting a layer of titanium dioxide as thin as three nanometers between a pair of platinum layers....

The wasps and bees buzzing around your garden might seem like simple-minded creatures. They build nests, forage for nectar, raise their young and then die, their lives typically playing out over the course of a single year or less. Some of these species rival humans and other primates in at least one intellectual skill, however: they recognize the individual faces of their peers. More specifically, members of a species of paper wasp can perceive and memorize one another’s unique facial markings and are able to use this information to distinguish individuals during subsequent interactions, much as humans navigate their social environment by learning and remembering the faces of family, friends and colleagues....

The $8.9 billion James Webb Space Telescope may be the last big-budget observatory that NASA launches for a while. The White House’s proposed 2020 budget cancels the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), a $3.2 billion space mission viewed as a linchpin of astrophysics research through the 2020s and beyond. And that budget keeps NASA’s astrophysics funding so low over the coming years that the agency won’t be able to develop another ambitious, big-ticket “flagship” observatory for the foreseeable future, experts say....

Would a rat risk dying just to satisfy its desire for chocolate? I recently found out. In my laboratory, we gave rats unlimited access to their standard fare as well as to a mini cafeteria full of appetizing, high-calorie foods: sausage, cheesecake, chocolate. The rats decreased their intake of the healthy but bland items and switched to eating the cafeteria food almost exclusively. They gained weight. They became obese. We then warned the rats as they were eating—by flashing a light—that they would receive a nasty foot shock....

Flashy iridescent shells might not seem like the best evolutionary strategy for bugs trying to avoid hungry birds. But in recent years, biologists have shown that iridescence—lustrous shifts in color, depending on the angle of view—can actually camouflage green jewel beetles among sun-dappled leaves. Now a new study published in Animal Behavior suggests iridescence also works another way to protect these insects, even when they step into plain sight: birds appear to have an innate wariness of the color changes themselves....

Despite the long-held belief that personality traits are set in stone, numerous studies have found evidence to the contrary. Now research reveals that a changing character can influence life satisfaction even more than economic upheaval. Past studies have revealed that personality is the single biggest factor in how we perceive our own well-being, accounting for 35 percent of individual differences in life satisfaction. Research on well-being, however, has focused on less important factors, such as income and job status, because of the misperception that personality is generally fixed after early adulthood....

In the Hollywood movie version of revenge, our wronged hero justifiably vanquishes the villain. In real life, though, revenge is hardly ever so clear-cut. Aggrieved persons typically do not know, or cannot access, the specific individual who did them wrong. Instead a phenomenon occurs that psychologists call “displaced revenge,” where avengers target a proxy—someone akin to the original transgressor. A new study finds that displaced revenge is sweeter when the target seems to belong to the same group as the wrongdoer....