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By Steve GormanLOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Unseasonably balmy weather settled over Southern California on Wednesday as a region already accustomed to celebrating Christmas without snow experienced temperatures some 15 degrees (9 degrees Celsius) above normal.The warm spell baked the West Coast while the Midwest and Northeast were still dealing with the aftermath of a winter storm. Some 129,000 homes and businesses were without power on Christmas morning, energy companies reported.Southern California temperatures climbed to record or near-record levels in the upper 70s Fahrenheit (low 20s Celsius) and low 80s (mid 20s Celsius), propelled by warm, dry Santa Ana winds blowing toward the Pacific from the high deserts, meteorologists said....

In 1998, the year Deep Impact and Armageddon dueled for the attentions of apocalypse-from-the-heavens moviegoers, Congress tapped NASA to prevent such a cosmic cataclysm from becoming reality. The space agency was charged with cataloguing over the next decade the vast majority of nearby space objects larger than 0.62 mile (one kilometer) in size—those asteroids, and more rarely comets, capable of inflicting catastrophic damage to Earth. Eleven years later—just behind schedule—the task appears to be nearly complete....

This year is shaping up to be an important one in the search for planets around other stars. In April astronomers at the Geneva Observatory announced the discovery of the most Earth-like exoplanet yet located, the first rocky world beyond our solar system that could hold liquid water. Just 1.5 times the size of Earth and possessing five times its mass, the planet circles the red dwarf Gliese 581. More such announcements will likely come in the months to follow, as the first space observatory dedicated to hunting exoplanets, called COROT, begins full operation and researchers complete their calculations....

Physicists were thrilled this week at news of strong evidence for gravitational waves, perturbations of the early universe that confirm it expanded rapidly following the big bang during a period called inflation. To gain a different perspective on these findings, Carsten Koenneker of Scientific American’s German-language edition Spektrum interviewed Bruce Allen, director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, about the BICEP2 experiment that detected these long-sought waves. You study gravitational waves....

For years, evidence has been mounting that bacteria are linked to cancer, and sometimes even play a crucial part in its progression. Now, researchers have found a similar connection with another type of microorganism: fungi. Tumours of various types of cancer contain different species of microscopic or single-celled fungus, and investigating the species that are present might one day be useful for diagnosing cancer or predicting its course, according to two studies published in Cell on 29 September....

Why is the night sky dark? After all, if the universe is filled with billions of galaxies, every one of them swirling with billions of stars that have been emitting photons of light for billions of years, why would the universe not be awash with light? German astronomer Wilhelm Olbers pondered that question in the 1820s, and the riddle became known as Olbers’s paradox. By then, astronomers and philosophers had wondered for centuries why the sky was dark and what the darkness implied about the nature of the universe....

If you are one of the 92 percent of the population who regularly experience earworms—snippets of music that pop uninvited into your head and won’t go away—you might wish there was a way to make them stop. Earworms are a generally benign form of rumination, the repetitive, intrusive thoughts associated with anxiety and depression. Psychologists have long been looking for ways to turn off those unwelcome thoughts, and now a study from the University of Reading in England suggests a fresh approach: chew some gum....

Jeffrey Sutton, director of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute and Nitza Cintrn, chief of NASA’s Space Medicine and Health Care Systems Office, explain. Space is a harsh environment that affects the body in many ways. In microgravity, bone loss occurs at a rate of 1 to 1.5 percent a month, leading to an acceleration of age-related changes similar to osteoporosis. Decreases in bone density and strength are more pronounced in some skeletal regions, such as the pelvis, although much of the loss is reversible upon return to Earth....

Editor’s Note: Reprinted from How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival by David Kaiser. Copyright (c) 2011 by David Kaiser. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Click here to see a Scientific American video that explains quantum entanglement. [from Chapter 2, pp. 25-38:] The iconoclastic Irish physicist John S. Bell had long nursed a private disquietude with quantum mechanics. His physics teachers—first at Queen’s University in his native Belfast during the late 1940s, and later at Birmingham University, where he pursued doctoral work in the mid-1950s—had shunned matters of interpretation....

By Reuters Staff BANGKOK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Only nine countries have achieved a U.N. development goal of reducing the number of women dying before, during or after giving birth by 75% since 1990, the United Nations and the World Bank said on Thursday. Worldwide, maternal mortality fell by 43% in the 25-year period, thanks to access to better-quality health services during pregnancy and childbirth, and to sexual and reproductive health services and family planning, they said in a report in The Lancet....

As many science fiction fans out there already know, today is known as Star Wars Day. May 4 is a date that makes a clever wordplay on the popular movie quote, so fans everywhere are telling their friends, “May the Fourth be with you.” We at AccuWeather.com decided to take a look at the climates on the many different locations in the Star Wars Universe. For those of you who want a comparison to the weather in your backyard to the weather in the Star Wars Universe, there is a website to help you....

By Sanjeev Miglani and Rupam Jain Nair JHARIBAR/SINDHUPALCHOWK, Nepal, April 28 (Reuters) - People stranded in remote villages and towns across Nepal were still waiting for aid and relief to arrive on Tuesday, four days after a devastating earthquake destroyed buildings and roads and killed more than 4,600 people. The government has yet to assess the full scale of the damage wrought by Saturday’s 7.9 magnitude quake, unable to reach many mountainous areas despite aid supplies and personnel pouring in from around the world....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The first case of polio in the U.S. since 2013 was announced by New York state health officials on July 21, 2022. The U.S. resident had not been vaccinated. Polio was a common cause of paralysis in children before safe and effective vaccines were invented in the mid-20th century. Thanks to global vaccination campaigns, polio is now almost eradicated, with only 13 cases of endemic wild poliovirus reported in 2022 to date worldwide....

With bicycle share schemes, smoothly running metros and pedestrian-only streets, Europe has an edge over the New World when it comes to alternatives to automobile transportation. A new study reveals that Europe has success with another tool designed to remove people from their cars: subtracting parking spaces. Because every vehicle trip must end in a parking space, limiting parking through economic and policy changes has significantly reduced miles driven in 10 European cities, according to “Europe’s Parking U-Turn: from Accommodation to Regulation,” published by the New York City-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP)....

The majority of older Americans live out their final years with at least one or two chronic ailments, such as arthritis, diabetes, heart disease or stroke. The longer their body clock ticks, the more disabling conditions they face. Doctors and drug companies traditionally treat each of these aging-related diseases as it arises. But a small group of scientists have begun championing a bold new approach. They think it is possible to stop or even rewind the body’s internal chronometer so that all these diseases will arrive later or not at all....

By Lawrence Hurley WASHINGTON, Feb 16 (Reuters) - A vote to block the Obama administration’s ambitious climate regulation was one of Antonin Scalia’s last acts as a Supreme Court justice. His sudden death may have opened a new path to the rule’s survival. Scalia died Saturday. Four days earlier, he voted with the other conservative members of the high court to put a hold on the administration’s plans to implement the Clean Power Plan while it is litigated....

The perfect sphere that will be used to redefine the kilogram in terms of the Planck constant in 2018 has been shown to consist of the purest silicon ever made. The kilogram is the only unit still based on a physical object. The ‘big k’ is a platinum–iridium cylinder stored in an underground vault in France. However, over time this artefact can gain or lose atoms, which is why the International Committee for Weights and Measures decided to redefine the unit using the Planck constant....

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, died Wednesday at age 56. The cause was pancreatic cancer. Jobs had been battling cancer for at least 6 years, telling his employees in 2004 that he was being treated for the disease, and undergoing a liver transplant in 2009. On August 24, he announced to the board of Apple that he was stepping down as CEO, whereupon Tim Cook, the COO, took over. Jobs’ death comes one day after the company, now under the helm of Tim Cook, announced the iPhone 4S, the latest in a series of handheld products that has catapaulted Apple as one of the leading device makers over the past decade, starting with the iPod and iTunes in 2001....

I started teaching human anatomy at the same time my university renovated my laboratory. As it turns out, this coincidence could not have been more propitious. Teaching anatomy for the first time can be a struggle, and it is not just because there are an enormous number of names to learn. A glimpse inside the body reveals structures left inside of us during the course of evolution, which often seem a confused jumble, with arteries, nerves and other structures taking odd paths to get from one part of the body to another....

On examining a map of the world, many schoolchildren notice that the continents surrounding the Atlantic Ocean can be neatly fit together like pieces of a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. Just snug West Africa up against the East Coast of the U.S. and shove the northern end of South America into the Gulf Coast. That is indeed how these continents were arranged a few hundred million years ago, a fact geologists know, in part, because the plate tectonic movements that created this great landmass left their marks....