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(Reuters) - A deadly and intensifying winter storm packing heavy snow, sleet and rain pelted a huge swath of the U.S. East Coast on Thursday, grounding flights and shuttering schools and government offices. Winter storm warnings and advisories were in place from Georgia up to Maine, and the powerful system could blanket the Atlantic Coast over the next two days with 12 to 18 inches (30 to 46 cms) of snow, said Jared Guyer, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service....

“We used a probabilistic approach—actually, that was one of the novelties of our work,” says study co-author Sadegh Shahmohammadi, an environmental scientist at Radboud University in the Netherlands. “Previous studies showed contradicting results [as to] whether online is better or offline is better. We wanted to improve the reliability of those models and see what is exactly going on.” The model incorporated various factors, including the number of products purchased, packaging, storage and greenhouse gas emissions for various types of transportation....

Ganymede and Callisto are the largest of Jupiter’s so-called Galilean satellites, the four moons of the giant planet that were discovered 400 years ago, in January 1610, by Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, even bigger than the planet Mercury, boasts its own magnetic field and bears the marks of past tectonic activity. But Callisto, of roughly equal size and with a similar makeup of rock and ice, has neither a magnetic field nor an apparent history of tectonics—the moons’ geologic histories have proceeded very differently....

Late in the evening of October 24, 2017, an e-mail arrived containing tantalizing news of the heavens. Astronomer Davide Farnocchia of the nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory was writing to one of us (Jewitt) about a new object in the sky with a very strange trajectory. Discovered six days earlier by Robert Weryk, then a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii, the object, initially dubbed P10Ee5V, was traveling so fast that the sun could not keep it in orbit....

The hotter the world gets, the more people will turn up the air-conditioning. But cooling air requires energy, which generates greenhouse gas emissions. In the U.S., air conditioners contribute more than 100 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year. Yi Cui, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, wants to cool people with clothing instead. Even lightweight clothes made of cotton fabric absorb infrared radiation emitted by our bodies, trapping heat....

Europe’s major brain-research project has unveiled a set of prototype computing tools and called on the global neuroscience community to start using them. The move marks the end of the 30-month ramp-up phase of the Human Brain Project (HBP), and the start of its operational phase. The release of the computing platforms—which include brain-simulation tools, visualization software and a pair of remotely accessible supercomputers to study brain processes in real time—could help to allay concerns about the €1-billion (US$1....

For most technophiles, a hologram evokes grainy images in Star Wars of Princess Leia pleading for Ben “Obi-Wan” Kenobi’s help. More than three decades later, holograms have evolved little beyond providing authentication features on driver’s licenses and credit cards. But that all could change soon with the development of a new photorefractive polymer that paves the way for 3-D images that will one day help doctors study X-rays, engineers design buildings, military officers plan battles—as well as be used in movies, video games and other multidimensional entertainment....

Dear EarthTalk: Used motor oil is a big contributor to the pollution in our waterways and drinking water. How can I make sure I am not contributing to this problem? – John Eckerle, Jupiter, FL Motor oil leaked from individual vehicles—or outright dumped by homeowners and commercial garages—constitutes a significant chunk of storm water runoff, the fallen precipitation that runs off of roads and parking lots and inevitably finds its way into local water bodies....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - An invasive lizard first spotted in southern and central Florida about a decade ago has become the latest concern for wildlife officials after the four-foot-long, black-and-white tegu was caught on video stealing alligator and turtle eggs from their nests. Scientists from the University of Florida during the spring and summer of 2013 planted several cameras in the Everglades around nests containing dozens of eggs. “We captured images of tegus removing (up to) two eggs per day until an examination of the nest on Aug....

The world’s first space-based system to help identify specific sources of greenhouse gas emissions is now circling the Earth. The main unit in the network, an orbiter called the Tropospheric Monitoring Instrument (Tropomi), is a package of state-of-the-art sensors launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in October. By December, it had begun to map the plumes of methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and various aerosols over industrial facilities and cities as it passed over Europe, Asia, Africa and South America....

Jupiter Propp, the fictitious composite yachtsman, uses eddies and the Gulf Stream to great advantage when racing from Connecticut to Bermuda. To show his technique, he proposes a simple game that can be played by remote-controlled cars and a ground-level rotating disk. The goal is to go from the northern horizontal bar to the southern one—to be precise, from the point where the northern horizontal bar meets the dotted-line segment (“Connecticut”) to the point where the southern horizontal bar meets the dotted-line segment (“Bermuda””) in the least time....

Imagine a 60-year-old man recuperating at home after prostate cancer surgery, drawing comfort from the companionship of the aged Golden Retriever at his side. What the man probably does not realize, though, is that pet dogs like his could be important players in efforts to eliminate the suffering and death caused by cancer. Defeating cancer will require the application of everything in investigators’ tool kits, including an openness to new ideas....

When nations that were parties to the Montreal Protocol agreed to completely end the production of ozone-depleting substances by 1992, the agreement led to the restoration of the ozone layer, which acts as a shield to protect all life from the sun’s harmful radiation. Awareness and cooperation were vital to this accomplishment, says a new study examining human behavior and saying that these elements will be crucial to upcoming international negotiations toward mitigating climate change....

In just two decades Sweden went from burning oil for generating electricity to fissioning uranium. And if the world as a whole were to follow that example, all fossil fuel–fired power plants could be replaced with nuclear facilities in a little over 30 years. That’s the conclusion of a new nuclear grand plan published May 13 in PLoS One. Such a switch would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions, nearly achieving much-ballyhooed global goals to combat climate change....

The number of places on Earth with the right combination of natural climate and geography for the Olympic Winter Games is already inherently limited. But as global temperatures rise from the burning of fossil fuels, the list is narrowing further. Factoring in the specific conditions that world-class skiers and snowboarders need to safely land tricks and have fair downhill races means very few past host cities will be able to reliably hold the games again by century’s end, a new study finds....

After being diagnosed with COVID in November 2020, Andrea King Collier doubted the antibodies that she had developed in response to the illness would protect her from a second infection and was determined to be first in, or near the front of, the line for a vaccine. The Flint, Mich., resident registered at every vaccine distribution site she could find and never stopped looking for a way to receive shots early....

Pity the poor astronomers living in our galaxy 100 billion years from now, for they will detect neither hide nor hair of the big bang that kicked off the known universe. Researchers say that the runaway expansion of the cosmos by then will have blown away all evidence of the big bang like dandelion fluff into the wind. With it will go cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe....

From coalition governments to teams of scientists, the notion that “two heads are better than one” is the en vogue approach to problem-solving these days. The premise is simple: We perform better and make more sensible decisions by putting our heads together than by working alone. For example, let’s say that there are two stock traders – Warren and Ben. The notion is that if they work together to pick stocks they will make more profit than if they work in isolation....

In just a few months, NASA will celebrate the 60th anniversary of American astronauts’ venturing into outer space. Alan Shepard’s 15-minute suborbital ride started the journey. Just two and half months later Virgil (Gus) Grissom reached a height of 118 miles, and seven months after that John Glenn circled the Earth three times. Long before the initial Mercury space flights blasted off, much longer flights were already planned. As the number of Earth orbits in a mission increased, the physiological concerns surrounding keeping humans alive and functioning at peak performance in difficult environments for extended time periods came to the fore....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Most people probably wouldn’t consider bustling towns and cities good places for nature to thrive. Yet a few species of birds have so successfully adapted to city living that they boast large and thriving urban populations. Now, research has suggested that the success of these city-dwelling species may lie in their behaviour. Urban habitats are quite different to the natural environments in which birds evolved....