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By Amy Sawitta LefevreBANGKOK (Reuters) - An oil spill that has blackened beaches at a Thai holiday island was having an extreme impact on tourism and could spread to the coast of the mainland and affect the fishing industry, officials and an environmental group said on Tuesday.Tourists were pouring off the island of Koh Samet, 230 km (142 miles) southeast of Bangkok, while soldiers and volunteers in white bio-hazard suits struggled to clear black oily sludge off the white sand....

President Biden used his first State of the Union address to reset his administration after a year of inflation and crises at home and abroad that has left him with nearly record-low approval ratings. But Biden did little to restart his stalled climate agenda. He spoke only briefly about climate change—talking about it roughly as much as diabetes—leaving some Democrats puzzled over Biden’s path forward on what he calls an “existential threat....

Late last month, a team of 46 doctors and nurses in the Los Angeles suburb Bellflower pulled eight babies from the belly of a 33-year-old woman. The octuplets—the second known set to have been born in the U.S.—were nine weeks premature and were delivered in just five minutes via caesarean section. The feat shifted from a source of biological wonderment to opprobrium as it was revealed that the mother, Nadya Suleman, an unemployed, graduate student who lives with her parents, already had six other children, ages two to seven....

Even though we humans write the textbooks and may justifiably be suspected of bias, few doubt that we are the smartest creatures on the planet. Many animals have special cognitive abilities that allow them to excel in their particular habitats, but they do not often solve novel problems. Some of course do, and we call them intelligent, but none are as quick-witted as we are. What favored the evolution of such distinctive brainpower in humans or, more precisely, in our hominid ancestors?...

As the dust settles on Britain’s unexpected decision to depart the European Union, there are more questions than answers about what the pullout means for everything from trade to energy policy. Bewildered European policy analysts—many of whom assumed the “Brexit” referendum would deliver a narrow victory for the “remain” camp—are still grappling with Thursday’s result. What will the split between Britain and the other 27 nations of the European Union mean for British expats?...

The Hubble Space Telescope is an iconic observatory, a triumph of space science that may be the most famous unmanned spacecraft since Sputnik. Hubble’s renown is certainly well-deserved, but the spacecraft is aging—it will mark its 20th anniversary of reaching orbit in April. Hubble’s services are still in tremendous demand, because it operates above the bulk of Earth’s obfuscating atmosphere and so offers astronomers their clearest view of the distant universe....

As president, I will reach out to the Senate to secure the ratification of the CTBT [Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty] at the earliest practical date and will then launch a diplomatic effort to bring onboard other states whose ratifications are required for the treaty to enter into force. —Barack Obama, September 10, 2008 As this article goes to press, Iran’s nuclear program is rapidly expanding its capacity to enrich uranium. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, last November have once more raised the specter of a nuclear weapons exchange between India and Pakistan—a “regional war” that could kill tens of millions of both countries’ citizens and lead to severe change in global climate....

In my Scientific American column this month, I wrote about the irrationality of the Transportation Security Administration’s rules that govern air travel. I travel a heck of a lot as the host of a PBS science show, so trust me: every one of these absurdist rituals drives me nuts. Fortunately, technology also helps me remain sane—before, during and after each flight. Here are the phone apps, for iPhone or Android, that no traveler should be without:...

ANCHORAGE, Alaska — “Welcome aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 109 to smoky Anchorage,” a voice said over the loudspeaker as travelers boarded a plane in Fairbanks. The skies turned from blue to dark gray halfway through the 260-mile flight, shrouding the stunning vistas below. Then they disappeared altogether. In the final two minutes, as the wheels reached for the runway at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, the smell of smoke filled the pressurized cabin of the Boeing 737 and an eerie orange colored the Alaskan landscape....

For years, innovators have tried to devise computerized gadgetry to aid the brain. Advances have come slowly, but new work unveiled in recent months has sparked enthusiasm. Computer scientist Roel Vertegaal of Queen’s University in Ontario has crafted headphones that replicate the brain’s unconscious noise filter, which handles the so-called cocktail party effect. In a crowded setting, two people in a conversation use eye contact to help them focus on each other’s words and tune out background noise....

NASA was always supposed to look close to home as well as out to the stars. In 1958 the U.S. Congress chartered the agency to focus on “phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” Through Earth-observing satellites, nasa has vastly improved weather forecasting and natural disaster prediction and relief. It may have even helped to save the world when, in the 1980s, it showed that a dangerous hole in the planet’s protective ozone layer was growing....

The European Commission has quietly announced plans to launch a €1-billion (US$1.13 billion) project to boost a raft of quantum technologies—from secure communication networks to ultra-precise gravity sensors and clocks. The initiative, to launch in 2018, will be similar in size, timescale and ambition to two existing European flagships, the decade-long Graphene Flagship and the Human Brain Project, although the exact format has yet to be decided, Nathalie Vandystadt, a commission spokesperson, toldNature....

Bumblebees are already stressed by pesticides and habitat loss. Now add global warming. A new, large study of North America and Europe shows that rising atmospheric temperatures are shrinking the geographic range across which wild bumblebees live. The insects are disappearing from their southernmost regions as those places heat up. But they are not migrating farther northward as higher latitudes warm. “That is the surprise,” says Leif Richardson, a research fellow in ecological economics at the University of Vermont who co-led the research....

By Peroshni Govender KRUGER NATIONAL PARK South Africa (Reuters) - Rhino poachers in South Africa now risk giving themselves away when they shoot thanks to a high-tech, gunfire-detection system being piloted in the country’s flagship Kruger National Park. The stakes are high, for rhinos are being slain in escalating numbers for their prized horns, alarming both conservationists and the government since wildlife in South Africa is an important tourist draw. “ShotSpotter”, a product of privately-held California company SST Inc, has previously been used in crime-ridden urban U....

The emergency phase of COVID-19 might have passed, but it remains fresh in the minds of politicians and the public. This is a unique moment to learn from the global response. More outbreaks of infectious disease are inevitable. But it is possible to stop many of them turning into pandemics. The past 20 years of outbreaks—not only of COVID-19, but also Zika, Ebola, swine flu, Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)—can teach us how to improve global health security....

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë. Hill and Wang, 2009 Your brain is a three-pound hunk of grayish jelly. Your mind hosts a stream of thoughts and sensations. Despite recent advances in neuroscience, we don’t know how to get from one to the other: we still can’t explain the mind in terms of the brain. Some believe that if we keep studying the brain with the tools we have, we will eventually work up to the conscious mind....

If you need a liver and live in Boston, your chance of getting one in time is about 53 percent. Drive a couple of hours southwest to Connecticut, and your chances jump to 85 percent. The difference is encapsulated in the national organ transplant map, which divides the U.S. into self-contained districts of organ allocation. Among other factors, areas with lots of highways—and the accompanying traffic fatalities that make healthy organs available for transplant—will generally have a shorter wait time....

The poison frogs of Central and South America are as deadly as they are beautiful, thanks to chemicals called alkaloids that they secrete through their skin. Indeed, the venom from a single golden poison frog, for example, can kill 10 humans. Now researchers have unlocked the secrets of their counterparts in Madagascar and found that they employ the same method of acquiring their toxins: through careful food consumption. Studies of these frogs in the Neotropics indicated that a diet rich in ants provided the alkaloids, but whether the same held true for Malagasy populations was unknown....

What happens when you put the life of the mind and the problems of a global civilization in a jar and shake it? The powerful and sometimes uneasy alliance between science and the society it serves is the theme of this year’s special report on the “State of the World’s Science.” We start with the phenomenon of Big Science, which occurs when society deems an area of research important enough to throw money and resources at it....

In late 2008 two teams made waves with the simultaneous announcement that they had managed to directly photograph planets in orbit around distant stars, also known as exoplanets. Although hundreds of exoplanets had already been found orbiting sun-like stars throughout the Milky Way, they had been discovered by indirect means—astronomers had inferred the presence of a planet by observing the dimming effects or gravitational wobble an orbiting companion induces on its parent star....