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President Bush this week called on the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases warming the world to set a “long-term goal” for reducing such pollution, but was vague on how to complete the task. “By setting this goal, we acknowledge there is a problem,” President Bush told representatives of 17 nations attending the Major Economies Meeting on Energy Security and Climate Change held in Washington, D.C., this week. “We must lead the world to produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, and we must do it in a way that does not undermine economic growth or prevent nations from delivering greater prosperity for their people....

Once upon a time people firmly believed that thinking and feeling were two separate capacities, destined to often clash. As 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza put it, “When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune.” By this logic, the intensity of experiences such as sadness, anger or fear can trump our reasoning. Yet modern research tells us otherwise....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Scientists have long tried to explain the origin of a mysterious, large and anomalously cold region of the sky. In 2015, they came close to figuring it out as a study showed it to be a “supervoid” in which the density of galaxies is much lower than it is in the rest of the universe....

Electric vehicles, a modernized electrical grid and even smartphones would be little more than pipe dreams without the ability to store energy. More specifically, they rely on batteries, a centuries-old technology forced to mature ever more quickly to meet our growing demands for portable power. Progress, at least when it comes to technology, poses myriad challenges for battery researchers. Their devices must work harder without generating more heat and do so without significantly driving up the prices of the technologies they power....

It looks like NASA’s famous Hubble Space Telescope has recovered from the glitch that knocked the observatory offline more than two weeks ago. On Oct. 5, Hubble went into a protective “safe mode” after one of its orientation-maintaining gyroscopes failed. Mission team members tried to recruit a backup gyro, but that instrument refused to behave, returning anomalous readings. However, a number of troubleshooting activities conducted over the past week appear to have brought the balky gyro to heel, NASA officials announced today (Oct....

Don Lincoln is a senior scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab, the United States’ biggest Large Hadron Collider research institution. He also writes about science for the public, including his recent “The Large Hadron Collider: The Extraordinary Story of the Higgs Boson and Other Things That Will Blow Your Mind” (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). You can follow him on Facebook. Lincoln contributed this article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights....

The best teeth that Christina Warinner sees in her office are the ones with chunks of plaque as big as lima beans fixed to their enamel. Warinner is not a dentist, although she uses some of the same tools. She is an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, and she performs centuries-delayed dental cleanings on the likes of Vikings and Stone Age farmers to scrape up details about how humans once lived....

Now, new research shows that one of the planet’s largest and most important carbon sinks, the forests of northern Eurasia, may be pulling in carbon at a slower rate than in the past. What is even more worrying is the possibility that regions that were absorbing carbon may emerge as sources of carbon emissions as the permafrost melts. In northern Eurasia, the annual net sink rate increased from the 1960s to the 2000s, but since then, the rate at which carbon is sequestered by the region has leveled and even showed signs of weakening, said Michael Rawlins, an assistant professor in the University of Massachusetts’ Department of Geosciences....

The moon of today is a static orb with little to no internal activity; for all intents and purposes it appears to be a dead, dusty pebble of a world. But billions of years ago the moon may have been a place of far more dynamism—literally. A new study of a lunar rock scooped up by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin during their Apollo 11 mission indicates that the ancient moon long sustained a dynamo—a convecting fluid core, much like Earth’s, that produces a global magnetic field....

It hit me when the university president’s e-mail landed in my inbox: “We will be suspending all classes, sending everyone home and all instruction will take place remotely.” The national emergency prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic had just upended everything! As a board member, I felt that one of my worst nightmares had been realized. Suddenly, students lost their campus connections and had to move to online instruction. It wasn’t clear what freshman classes would look like or if prospective students would even be able to complete common admissions requirements such as providing certified transcripts or standardized test scores....

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - A hundred thousand residents were being evacuated from coastal areas of India’s southeastern Andhra Pradesh state as a cyclone swirling in the Bay of Bengal was forecast to make landfall late on Friday with wind speeds up to 120 kph (75 mph).Cyclone Helen, the second tropical storm to hit the state in six weeks, is likely to cause extensive damage to thatched roofs and huts and disrupt power and communication lines, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Thursday....

Key concepts Physics Velocity Acceleration Gravity Introduction Have you ever dropped something and wondered how fast it was moving while falling? (If it was something fragile, you might not have been thinking about this at the time—you were likely too busy trying to grab the object!) We all know that gravity forces an object to fall. But how does this affect how quickly something falls and its impact? For example, did the object move faster right after leaving your hand, or just before hitting the ground?...

Moths are able to hover serenely because their antennae act like tiny gyroscopes, report researchers who let the insects fly after cutting off their antennae and supergluing them back on. In a second study, another team built a small robocopter to test a theory of insect flight. The robot reproduced insect behaviors such as angling down in a headwind and crashing over featureless terrain, which may explain reports that bees have drowned while skimming mirror-still water....

A newly discovered tarantula sports a black coat that is as dark and brooding as its celebrity namesake: the renowned singer Johnny Cash. Tarantulas, the hairy spiders that stole movie scenes and won hearts in popular films like “Home Alone,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “Dr. No,” take a starring role in a new study that reorganizes their group, reclassifying the majority of 55 known tarantula species and adding 14 new ones, including the creepy-crawly named for Cash....

Over the past 13 years, the editors of ACSM’s Health & Fitness Journal® (FIT) have circulated an electronic survey to thousands of wellness professionals around the world to determine the current year’s health and fitness trends. The first survey was conducted in 2006 and it introduced what was meant to be a systematic way of predicting health and fitness trends. The survey has been conducted annually since that time, using the same methodology....

Male pipefish, seahorses and their kin are the stay-at-home dads of the fish world, rearing their young in placentalike pouches from the time they are fertilized eggs until they can swim away. New research shows that these involved fathers not only shelter their young but transfer key nutrients to their offspring via their own versions of a placenta, helping to supplement what the embryos received from their mother in the egg yolk....

The world is prepared to put up with quite a lot to keep the United States in the Paris climate deal. If White House officials who want the United States to remain part of the 2015 agreement prevail in what appears to be an ongoing tug of war within the administration, the trade-off is likely to be weaker emissions commitments and no new climate aid for the remainder of President Trump’s term....

Renewables are on track to generate more power than coal in the United States this year. But the question is whether they can grow fast enough to meet the country’s climate goals. Supply chain constraints and trade disputes have slowed wind and solar installations, raising questions about the United States’ ability to meet the emission reductions sought by the Inflation Reduction Act. The Biden administration is banking on the landmark climate law cutting emissions by 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030....

Embryonic stem cells have the potential to grow into any number of specialized cells. Guided in the prenatal environment, such cells become the incredible variety of cells that comprise our bodies. These pluripotent cells thus offer a new avenue for creating novel therapies for a wide range of ailments. Scientists have found it hard, however, to induce stem cells to grow in vitro the same way they grow in the womb....

Scientific American presents Tech Talker by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. The internet is huge. I’m sure many of you know that, but it’s almost unbelievable that when Googling the term “cat videos” that Google can serve up nearly a billion hits from all across the web. Now keep in mind there are 7 billion people on the planet. It’s mind boggling....