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The Colorado River system’s ongoing 19-year drought could trigger unprecedented water rationing among its southern states by mid-2020, a new study warns. The river, which supplies 40 million people, is going through the longest dry spell in recorded history and one of the driest in the past 1,200 years, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. Over this summer, Reclamation said the chance of a water shortage in the river’s lower basin rose from 52 percent to 57 percent by 2020, based on computer model projections that look ahead five years....

The best-laid plans of MICE and muons did not go awry: Physicists at the International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, collaboration have achieved their yearslong goal of quickly sapping energy from muons. Muons are fundamental particles that, like electrons, possess a negative charge, but they are more than 200 times as heavy. The results, reported in Nature on February 5, are the first demonstration of ionization cooling, a technique which could allow researchers to control muons for future collider applications....

Now that a helicopter has flown on Mars and oxygen is being manufactured there, children today might start imagining themselves on the Red Planet—going to school, tending plants and playing sports in 38 percent of Earth gravity. It feels almost inevitable that humans will eventually land there, building small biospheres with plants, microbes, and humans intertwined in a tightly controlled ecosystem. When we go, we will bring some of Earth’s species to Mars, such as the microbes on our skin, and we might even find some life already there....

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016 was split, with one half going to David J. Thouless at the University of Washington, and the other half going to F. Duncan M. Haldane at Princeton University and J. Michael Kosterlitz at Brown University. The Prize was awarded for the theorists’ research in condensed matter physics, particularly their work on topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter, phenomena underlying exotic states of matter such as superconductors, superfluids and thin magnetic films....

QUANTUM REALITY As Meinard Kuhlmann points out in “Physicists Debate Whether the World Is Made of Particles or Fields—or Something Else Entirely” particles and fields are not real but are analogies developed to describe another realm of reality, one that is not accessible to our senses but inferred from observation, measurement, mathematics and theory. An electromagnetic wave is not really like a wave on the ocean, but it is in many ways analogous to such a wave, and through such an analogy, it seems more comprehensible....

SCREENING STATS During my 30-year practice of diagnostic radiology, I spent many hours educating physicians and surgeons on the importance of false positives and false negatives in the diagnostic process. No diagnostic test is 100 percent accurate. My mantra was always: don’t treat initial test results. Always confirm the diagnosis with other independent data before performing surgery or prescribing pharmaceuticals with serious side effects. I applaud the general theme of mathematician John Allen Paulos in “Weighing the Positives” [Advances]....

So just how green are these sources of low-carbon renewable electricity? Pretty green, it turns out. Rolling out wind and solar power projects across the globe through 2050 will probably have a very low climate and environmental impact and even reduce air pollution despite the need for extracting pollution-intensive raw materials for those wind, solar and hydropower projects, according to new research published Monday. As part of the new Norwegian University of Science and Technology study, researchers conducted the first-ever lifecycle analysis of a wide-scale global rollout of new wind, hydro and solar power plants, asking whether shifting from coal and natural gas power generation to renewables would increase or decrease certain types of pollution....

ECUADOR New fishing restrictions covering 20,000 square miles around the Galápagos Islands aim to create an underwater “highway” for local wildlife. This region would help link neighboring countries’ protected areas along the Pacific coast. ETHIOPIA Paleoanthropologists analyzed crystals in a layer of volcanic ash to reevaluate the age of Kibish Omo I, a fossil that is among Earth’s oldest human remains. The specimen appears to be 233,000 years old—more than 30,000 years older than previously thought....

The list of gadgets that have been replaced by the smartphone is stunningly long—and growing. Camera, camcorder, music player, GPS unit, scanner, voice recorder, radio, Game Boy. Who buys those anymore, now that a single phone can get the job done? But small electronics aren’t the only entities being displaced in the mobile revolution. Media channels, including newspapers, magazines and television shows, are also suffering. Even Web surfing on our regular computers is taking a hit, as we do more and more of our Internetting on phones and tablets....

The causes of the environmental crisis may be hugely complex, but the most effective way to deal with it in economic terms seems rather obvious. We must use our best scientific understanding of how environmental problems can be resolved as the basis for implementing scientifically viable economic policies and solutions. If this could be accomplished within the framework of the economic theory that we now use to coordinate economic activities in the global market system—neoclassical economics—there would be no cause for concern....

Herbal therapies are astoundingly popular among the American public. In 2008 statistician Patricia M. Barnes of the National Center for Health Statistics and her colleagues reported that almost 20 percent of children and adults in the U.S. had used an herbal medicine during the past year. In 1998 a team led by physician David M. Eisenberg of Harvard Medical School determined that use of herbs for physical and mental problems had risen 380 percent between 1990 and 1997....

Dear EarthTalk: I need to replace my old TV. Can you tell me which of the latest models is the greenest? I was told that the flat-screen/plasmas are real energy hogs. What do you recommend? – Angela Montague, via e-mail According to The Wall Street Journal’s Rebecca Smith, a 42-inch plasma TV set can draw more power than a large refrigerator, even if the TV is only used a few hours a day....

The recent discovery of several hundred children’s remains in unmarked graves at residential schools for Indigenous children in Canada has highlighted similar suffering in over 350 such schools in the U.S., which are only now being investigated. The causes of so many deaths—of 4,120 children identified by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, with many more unidentified—included tuberculosis and other diseases, but cruel patterns of corporal punishment and sexual abuse also played a major role....

Just as most of the matter in the universe is thought to be “dark matter,” much of Earth is populated by a kind of microbial analogue: microorganisms that are known to exist but have never been grown in a laboratory. A new study, published last September in mSystems, suggests such microbes could account for up to 81 percent of all bacterial genera that live outside the human body. These little-known organisms could hold the secrets to new tools for treating disease and could help us understand life in extreme environments, such as those on other planets....

Two new particles made of exotic types of quarks have appeared inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland. The particles are never-before-seen species of baryons—a category of particles that also includes the familiar protons and neutrons inside atoms. The new baryons had been long predicted to exist, but their specific characteristics, such as their mass, were unknown until they were discovered in the flesh. The new measurements serve to confirm and refine the existing theory of subatomic particles and help pave the way for a deeper theory that could include even more exotic particles....

Rank Country Income group Score 1 Norway Upper 82.7 2 New Zealand Upper 82.2 3 Sweden Upper 81.6 4 Finland Upper 81.5 5 Denmark Upper 81.4 6 Australia Upper 80.1 7 United Kingdom Upper 80.0 8 United States Upper 78.9 9 Germany Upper 78.8 9 Iceland Upper 78.8 11 Canada Upper 78.2 12 Switzerland Upper 77.8 13 Austria Upper 77.6 14 Japan Upper 76.1 15 Singapore Upper 76.0 16 France...

The sun is the most abundant power source on Earth, but new designs soon hitting the market could keep its energy flowing even after sunset. Researchers are exploring various strategies to put sunshine on tap, converting the sun’s energy into fuels that can be stored, transported and used as needed. Setting excess power aside can help solar plants produce consistent electricity throughout the day, diminishing one of solar energy’s biggest drawbacks....

Can philosophy give us Truth? Probably not, but I still enjoy it. At its best, philosophy knocks my perceptions off kilter and helps me see the world anew. Sometimes, it makes me smile. And that brings me to philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel. I first encountered his work in 2015, after I posted a critique of integrated information theory, a theory of consciousness with crazy implications. Someone pointed me toward a position that Schwitzgebel calls “crazyism,” which holds that a theory of consciousness is likely to sound, well, crazy....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. When people hear “Appalachia,” stereotypes and even slurs often immediately jump to mind, words like “backwards,” “ignorant,” “hillbilly” or “yokel.” But Appalachian attitudes about technology’s role in daily life are extremely sophisticated—and turn out to be both insightful and useful in a technology-centric society. Many Americans tend to view Appalachian life as involving deprivation and deficit....

Saturn’s moon Titan is the only known place in our solar system, other than Earth, where liquid lakes and seas persist on a world’s surface. Scientists are fiercely curious about these features, and now new calculations plumb the impressive depths of Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare—a frigid blend of methane, ethane and nitrogen. The finding comes from a fresh analysis of radar scans performed by the Cassini probe as it passed haze-shrouded Titan in August 2014....