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London, Paris, Rome, New York. If civilization needed an icon, “the city” would be it. Half of humanity now lives in urban areas, a figure heading for 75 percent in coming decades. Or maybe not. The sprawling North American city in particular is a product of the cheap energy and profligate consumption of a materially exuberant age that is rapidly coming to an end. Cities may well confront a triple specter of climate change, scarcity of energy and resources, and broken supply lines....

The series Too Hard for Science? discusses ideas scientists would love to explore that they think are difficult or impossible to investigate. The Scientist: Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School. The Idea: How many memories does a person create in one day? Assumptions regarding this number are at the foundation of many studies of the brain. One could put recording equipment on volunteers and compare what they experienced to what they actually remembered about events, Stickgold suggests....

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, a desultory robot named Marvin struggles to get through his days. Possessed of “a brain the size of a planet,” he is 50,000 times more intelligent than a human, yet he cannot solve his own biggest problem: an unshakable ennui. “The first ten million years were the worst,” Marvin recounted at one point. “And the second ten million years, they were the worst too....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. As 17-year cicadas wriggle out of the ground all over the northeastern U.S. this spring, they’ll be reemerging into a world that understands them a little better. Researchers now find the design of their wings can cause filth to jump right off of them with the aid of dew, findings that might help lead to better artificial self-cleaning materials. Scientists had known that cicada wings are super-water-repellent, or super-hydrophobic....

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, made a rare foray into the climate debate Tuesday, releasing a report reiterating what many scientific bodies have already said: The evidence is overwhelming. Temperatures are going up. Springs are arriving earlier. Ice sheets are melting. Seas are rising. Rainfall and drought patterns are changing. Heat waves are getting worse, as is extreme precipitation. The oceans are acidifying. “The science linking human activities to climate change is analogous to the science linking smoking to lung and cardiovascular diseases....

The explosion of disinformation about COVID has been a defining aspect of the pandemic. Alongside the virus itself, we’ve been shadowed by what the World Health Organization has called an infodemic. This is widely known, of course, but much less discussed is the role of ostensible “experts” in perpetuating dangerous fictions. Since the dawn of the crisis, a disconcerting number of eminently qualified scientists and physicians have propagated falsehoods across social media, elevating themselves to the status of gurus to lend a veneer of seeming scientific legitimacy to empty, dangerous claims....

Chickens are by far the most numerous birds on the planet, with a population of around 23 billion. But new research suggests that another species was once a strong contender to become the world’s favorite poultry: ancient bird remains in China have turned out to be not from the first domesticated chickens, as researchers long assumed, but from pheasants. The study further indicates that wild pheasants lived side by side with people, shedding light on the early domestication process....

A crucial U.S. fuel pipeline operator recently announced it had been hit by ransomware, a type of cyberattack in which hackers encrypt important data so their owners cannot access them—unless the owners pay the criminals to unlock the information. Colonial Pipeline, a private company that transports nearly half of the U.S. East Coast’s gasoline and other fuel, had to shut down 5,500 miles of its fuel pipeline as a result. The FBI has blamed the attack on a criminal group called DarkSide....

If President Trump is able to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the nation’s highest bench, he may stymie climate action for generations to come. Legal experts say that the addition of a sixth conservative justice to the court could lock in opposition to expansive readings of the Clean Air Act that encompass greenhouse gas emissions or trigger a reexamination of the landmark 2007 climate case Massachusetts v. EPA....

They have been dubbed the “shouting heads”—television pundits who treat political discussion more as blood sport than reasoned argument. But new research suggests the problem is not just the shouting; our annoyance also comes from the apparent size of those heads. Shouting combined with extreme close-ups tends to make viewers less tolerant of opposing political viewpoints, according to Diana Mutz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “It takes people we would dislike regardless, and then it puts them in our faces in a way that truly intensifies our negative sentiments,” she says....

Make it a hat trick on the Red Planet for NASA’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity. The 4-lb. (1.8 kilograms) chopper aced its third-ever Martian flight early this morning (April 25), adding to its already impressive resume. “Third flight in the history books.” officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California wrote on Twitter. “Our #MarsHelicopter continues to set records, flying faster and farther. The space chopper is demonstrating critical capabilities that could enable the addition of an aerial dimension to future missions to Mars & beyond....

The future impact of global warming lies in the Arctic. There temperatures have risen almost twice as fast in recent decades as in the rest of the world. The Arctic Council, an intergovernmental organization comprising eight nations–the U.S., Canada, Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia–plus several indigenous peoples’ organizations, issued a sobering report last November. It estimates that by late in this century, average Arctic winter temperatures will rise roughly four to seven degrees Celsius over land and seven to 10 degrees C over oceans, leading to profound changes by the end of the century....

What’s the difference between a flock of birds and a rainstorm? It sounds like a dad joke—but it’s a serious question for biologists. Scientists have recently come up with a new way to track migrating birds using weather technology. And they’re finding that climate change may be affecting the movements of billions of birds each year. A study released yesterday in the journal Nature Climate Change suggests that rising temperatures are causing birds to migrate a little earlier each spring....

Behind the scenes, though, all their responses were scripted in advance by writers and programmers. (In fact, Apple employs a team of comedy writers exclusively for drafting Siri’s wisecracks.) Their underlying software is still, in essence, a passel of if/then statements. Soon, though, your voice assistant will be much, much smarter. After leaving Apple, three of Siri’s creators—Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham—started a company called Viv Labs. Whereas a Siri or a Cortana might know how to handle requests about weather, sports and about 20 other areas, Viv’s knowledge and vocabulary will be extensible and unlimited....

Attention, sea-loving explorers: There’s a $7 million reason to get serious about your passion for ocean research right now. On December 14, Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of X Prize, announced the launch of the Shell Ocean Discovery X Prize, a three-year global competition that challenges researchers to build better technologies for mapping what Diamandis called one of the “greatest unexplored frontiers”—Earth’s seafloor. “Our oceans cover two-thirds of our planet’s surface and are a crucial global source of food, energy, economic security and even the air we breathe, yet 95 percent of the deep sea remains a mystery to us,” Diamandis said December 14 at a keynote address during the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco....

DECEMBER 10 Children inherit much more from their parents than their genes. In a most extreme example, Monika Hertwig grew up with the burden of knowing her father had been the murderous Nazi captain Amon Göth. Göth, whose brutality was chillingly portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List, tortured and killed thousands of Jews in his year and a half as commandant of the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland. In the new documentary Inheritance, filmmaker James Moll explores our need to come to terms with the sins of our fathers, as he follows Hertwig on a journey to meet one of Göth’s surviving victims....

In May 2006 boiling mud, gas, water and rock started gushing out of the ground in northeastern Java, one of the islands in the Indonesian archipelago. The massive mud volcano—nicknamed “Lusi”—has continued to spew its hot contents even today, more than 11 years later. Experts say Lusi is the largest mud volcano in the world, now covering seven square kilometers of land. Since 2006 Lusi has dislocated some 60,000 people and caused more than $4 billion in economic damages....

If sunlight catches a rain shower at just the right moment, shimmering colors arc across the horizon. Although the most common rainbow is a single crescent containing every color from red through violet, if you pay close attention, you will discover that rainbows come in a surprising variety of colors and shapes. And scientists are finally figuring out why. Rainbows can be just red, missing violet and blue or completely white....

The new year has brought a new era in US–Cuba relations that is ripe for scientific cooperation between the two countries, after President Obamaannounced an easing of restrictions on 17 December. These changes involve relaxing visa application requirements and shortening the application process for scientists wishing to attend scientific meetings in the US or Cuba. Obama said that travel restrictions between the two countries would be relaxed for people in a dozen categories,including professional research and professional meetings, educational programmes, as well as the activities of private foundations, research or educational institutions....

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazineWhen US President Barack Obama proposed a US$664-million cut in congressional funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in his 2013 budget request, he tried to ease the pain by replacing much of it with money from other sources. But only days after the 13 February request, a vote on Capitol Hill made clear just how vulnerable those substitutions are, suggesting that the US public-health agency is on increasingly shaky financial ground....