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The U.S.’s exit from the historic 2015 Paris climate agreement takes effect today, capping four years of President Donald Trump aggressively rolling back the Obama administration’s climate-change-mitigation policies. The acceleration of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions on Trump’s watch has been blunted by state- and city-level efforts, a burgeoning renewable energy market and the COVID-19 pandemic’s economic downturn. But the Trump-era rollbacks could still ultimately lead to more heat-trapping carbon entering the atmosphere over the next decade or more....

The Federal Highway Administration is considering measuring the success of state and local transportation projects by their greenhouse gas emissions. FHWA asked for feedback on establishing the climate metric in a proposed rule establishing new performance standards for transportation projects receiving federal dollars. If finalized, it would be the first-ever requirement for all state and local transportation officials to tally and report their carbon pollution. “It’s a bold move by the secretary to include carbon pollution in the rule and it’s also eminently reasonable,” said Deron Lovaas, senior policy adviser on energy efficiency and transportation at the Natural Resources Defense Council....

In May of last year, a ring of explosives planted around the base of two 500-foot concrete cooling towers at what was once the largest coal-fired power plant in New England brought them down. In 18 seconds, they were reduced to dust and gravel. Then in February, the plant’s four soot-encrusted chimneys were felled like brick trees. The demolition of the Brayton Point Power Station was the stunning first act of a national energy drama playing out before the residents of Somerset, Mass....

MOTHERS will want to crucify me for this seemingly cruel question, but it needs to be posed: How do we know that a newly born and healthy infant is conscious? There is no question that the baby is awake. Its eyes are wide open, it wriggles and grimaces, and, most important, it cries. But all that is not the same as being conscious, of experiencing pain, seeing red or smelling Mom’s milk....

When we think about lives filled with meaning, we often focus on people whose grand contributions benefited humanity. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela surely felt they had a worthwhile life. But how about us ordinary people, toiling away in a typical existence? Many scholars agree that a subjectively meaningful existence often boils down to three factors: the feeling that one’s life is coherent and “makes sense,” the possession of clear and satisfying long-term goals and the belief that one’s life matters in the grand scheme of things....

Eleven summers ago I moved into a small house surrounded by woods but with enough sunshine to indulge my gardening habit. It was my own little Eden, complete, as it turned out, with a botanical snake in the garden: poison ivy. I learned to avoid its red shoots of spring, waxy green triad of leaves in summer, crimson foliage of autumn, and hairy vines still lurking in winter. I wore gloves to weed and sow, but still I’d wind up with the devilishly itchy rash a few times a year, lasting three weeks at a stretch....

Why do wind turbines have three narrow blades, whereas my fan at home has five wide blades? —J. Lester, Stroudsburg, Pa. Dale E. Berg, a member of the technical staff in the wind energy technology department at Sandia National Laboratories, replies: The differences between wind turbine and ceiling fan blades arise from the contrasting design criteria: the wind turbine is intended to capture high-velocity wind to generate electricity efficiently; the ceiling fan needs to move air at low velocity with inexpensive components....

Bovine biotech: researchers have created eight Holstein cattle that lack the gene for the prion protein, rendering them resistant to mad cow disease. The animals appear healthy without the gene. Nature Biotechnology, January 2007 Scientists have pinpointed one of the genes manipulated by Gregor Mendel—specifically, the gene that controls the color of pea seeds. It marks the third of the monk’s seven pea genes to be precisely identified. Science, January 5, 2007...

A small experiment that could eventually make a big difference for the climate is taking place on farmer Myron Ortner’s land in central Michigan. On a 40-acre plot where he grows corn and soybeans in rotation, Ortner has worked with Michigan State University researchers for the past several years to reduce his nitrogen fertilizer use. Normally, Ortner said, farmers use about 200 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre, but now he’s down to about 135 pounds per acre on the test plot....

More than a century after scientists embarked on the quest to find an alternative to the blood coursing through our veins, the dream still will not die. Not after a major study dealt a seemingly fatal blow to the field—determining that the top synthetic blood candidates at the time were all more likely to kill you than to save your life. Not after billions of dollars in public and private investments dried up....

For the first time ever, researchers have detected neutrino candidates produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN facility near Geneva, Switzerland. In a major milestone in particle physics, researchers in a new study report observing six neutrino interactions during an experiment at the LHC. Neutrinos are subatomic particles that have a very small mass like an electron but have no electrical charge—a characteristic that has made them extremely challenging to detect....

Dear EarthTalk: What was Proposition 37 in California that concerns the labeling of genetically modified foods and that was just voted down in that state?— Peter Tremaine, Euclid, Ohio Many healthy food advocates were disheartened on Election Day when Californians rejected Proposition 37, which would have required the labeling of genetically modified (GM) foods across the state. GM foods have had genes from other plants or animals inserted into their genetic code to optimize for one or another trait, such as resistance to pests, better taste or longer shelf life, and are controversial because scientists don’t know the ramifications of mixing genetic codes on such a widespread scale....

Astronomers have glimpsed the most powerful supernova ever seen, a star in a galaxy billions of light-years away that exploded with such force it briefly shone nearly 600 billion times brighter than our Sun and 20 times brighter than all the stars in the Milky Way combined. The explosion released 10 times more energy than the Sun will radiate in 10 billion years. If the supernova took place in our own galaxy, it would be easily seen by the naked eye even during the day; if it were 10,000 light-years away, it would appear to us at night as bright as the crescent Moon....

Dear EarthTalk: Should we expect to see “plug-in” hybrid cars anytime soon? I’ve been hearing they are on the horizon but I wonder if that means in one year or 10. – Bill A., Stratford, CT Gasoline-electric hybrids now, like Toyota’s popular Prius, don’t need to plug in—you just fill their tanks with gasoline and the battery keeps charged by the internal combustion engine and by energy generated from the wheels when braking (a feature known as “regenerative braking”)....

A study published in March in Tropical Conservation Science offers the latest look at the biological value of so-called secondary forests. An international team of ecologists and volunteers spent a year and a half identifying every bird, amphibian, reptile and medium-to-large mammal they could find on some 800 recovering hectares within Peru’s Manu Biosphere Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Their final count of 570 species amounted to 87 percent of those known to exist in neighboring old-growth, or primary, forests and included many imperiled creatures, such as shorteared dogs and giant armadillos....

There was light. But then what happened? How did life arise on the third rocky planet orbiting the unremarkable star at the center of our solar system? Humans have been wondering about the answer to that question probably almost as long as we’ve been able to wonder. In recent decades scientists have made some gains in understanding the conceivable mechanisms, gradually settling on a possible picture of our origins in the oceans....

Zeke Dunn of Brooklyn has worked at polling places in nearly every primary and general election since 2017. The 39-year-old television producer says doing so provides a way for him to connect with his neighbors and fulfill his civic duty. But this past June he skipped working in New York State’s primary: his partner is pregnant, and he could not risk bringing the novel coronavirus home from a polling place. As infection rates in New York City declined to low levels over the summer, Dunn decided to work the polls this November....

The mysterious source of Earth’s water has intrigued generations of scientists. Learning how this liquid—the cornerstone of life as we know it—made its way to our planet has sweeping implications, for the possibility of alien biospheres not only elsewhere in the solar system but also on worlds orbiting other stars. But understanding how water arrived on Earth has proven surprisingly difficult. After the sun formed from a cloud of dust and gas, the remaining protoplanetary disk of material was probably rich in water’s raw ingredients, hydrogen and oxygen....

By Matt KaplanThe burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil releases carbon dioxide that alters the balance of carbon isotopes naturally found in the environment–an effect that is now being found in food, reveals a US study.Modern methods for tracking the origins of processed foods use isotopes–atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. Of the most common naturally occurring isotopes of carbon–carbon-12, with six neutrons, and carbon-13, with seven–the heavier carbon-13 isotope is rarer....

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine TOKYO Japan has the world’s densest seismometer network, the biggest tsunami barriers and the most extensive earthquake early-warning system. Its population is drilled more rigorously than any other on what to do in case of earthquakes and tsunamis. Yet this month’s magnitude-9 earthquake surprised the country’s forecasters. The grossly underestimated tsunami destroyed the world’s deepest tsunami barrier and caught people by surprise. And the early-warning system for earthquakes largely failed....