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Climate change has exacerbated wildfires throughout America, and it’s testing the people who fight them. Outdated stereotypes of firefighters flipping flapjacks at the station and washing trucks have been replaced by dangerous calls into drier terrain to battle intensifying fires all year round. Climate change is a key factor. But some firefighters shy away from publicly connecting broader environmental issues to the growing inferno, choosing instead to focus on the glaring season ahead of them....

By Tom Miles GENEVA (Reuters) - The ozone layer that shields life from cancer-causing solar rays is showing its first sign of recovery after years of dangerous depletion, a U.N. study said on Wednesday, in a rare piece of good news on the environment. Experts said it was largely down to global action - a 1987 ban on man-made gases that damage the fragile high-altitude screen. The agreement would help prevent millions of cases of skin cancer and other conditions, they added....

A huge, superhot alien planet has a stratrosphere, like Earth does, a new study suggests. “This result is exciting because it shows that a common trait of most of the atmospheres in our solar system — a warm stratosphere — also can be found in exoplanet atmospheres,” study co-author Mark Marley, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, said in a statement. “We can now compare processes in exoplanet atmospheres with the same processes that happen under different sets of conditions in our own solar system,” Marley added....

When John Allen Reilly visits his hospice patients, he always takes along his iPhone. One of the applications he uses is A2Z of Dermatology to help classify skin conditions and to show photographs to his patients for comparison. Similar apps for health care professionals include Skyscape’s Medical Bag, which contains a host of treatment guidelines such as how to handle various cardiac conditions, read diagnostic lab tests and calculate weight-based dosing as well as On Call Notes, a basic notepad....

Dear EarthTalk: How is it that hydrogen can replace oil to run our cars? There seems to be a lot of controversy over whether hydrogen can really be generated and stored in such a way to be practical? – Stephane Kuziora, Thunder Bay, ON The jury is still out on whether hydrogen will ultimately be our environmental savior, replacing the fossil fuels responsible for global warming and various nagging forms of pollution....

A pair of French scientists who isolated the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and a German scientist who determined that human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine today. The Nobel committee’s decision to give the prize to Luc Montagnier and Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, who isolated HIV in 1983, caps a long, bitter dispute between the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where they made their discovery, and American scientist Robert Gallo, who linked HIV to AIDS separately but was snubbed by the Nobel committee....

The Toshiba-Westinghouse AP1000 reactor remains a symbol of the U.S. nuclear future to supporters and opponents alike. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission grants required approvals, the reactor, with its “passive” safety engineering, would be installed at the Vogtle nuclear station in Georgia as the first new unit built in the United States in a generation. Other utilities have selected the modified Westinghouse design for planned or proposed new plants. Foes of a U....

Six years after discovering the Higgs boson, physicists have observed how the particle decays—a monumental contribution to scientists’ understanding of the Standard Model of particle physics and the universe at large, study researchers said. Excitement swirled in the physics community when, in 2012, physicists discovered the Higgs boson, an elementary particle predicted by the Standard Model that relates to how objects have mass. But this discovery didn’t mark the end of Higgs boson exploration....

An asteroid strike 66 million years ago not only devastated the dinosaurs but almost reset life in the oceans back to a primitive soup of simple microorganisms. What prevented ocean ecosystems from totally collapsing, scientists hypothesize, may have been shell-covered algae that could feed on other organisms but maintained the ability to photosynthesize. This skill would preserve the foundation of the marine realm’s complex food webs through a long dark spell....

Physicists have used the quantum nature of matter to obtain a highly precise value for the universal gravitational constant, the ‘big G’ that appears in Isaac Newton’s law of how gravity pulls together everything, from planets to apples. Although the technique still needs refinements, physicists believe that in the future it will beat the precision of conventional methods — and hopefully solve apparent discrepancies between measurements that have long puzzled physicists....

In the weeks since Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops storming into neighboring Ukraine, blowback from that invasion has erupted around the world—and off-world, too. As the crisis deepens, it is increasingly disrupting international cooperation on present and planned projects for space science and exploration, potentially jeopardizing their future. Much like nesting matryoshka dolls of diminishing sizes that hide their true numbers from view, the war in Ukraine’s full impact on space activities remains to be seen....

Trilobites are perhaps the most successful group of animals ever to live. Named for their distinctive three-lobed body, these armored, pill-bug-like arthropods were some of the first hard-bodied animals on Earth. They appeared some 520 million years ago and dominated the fossil record of ancient seas for nearly 300 million years afterward. To date, paleontologists have uncovered a staggering 20,000 species, sporting every outlandish configuration of plates, spines and horns imaginable....

Digital cameras come with lots of bells and whistles. But what matters most is picture quality, and it has improved significantly in the newest pixel takers. Instead of striking unexposed film, light entering a typical digital camera is focused onto a charge-coupled device, or CCD. This semiconductor array, consisting of many tiny picture elements (pixels), converts light energy into electron charge. A microprocessor reads the charge in each pixel as a digital signal and constructs an image of the scene....

David Gems’s life was turned upside down in 2006 by a group of worms that kept on living when they were supposed to die. As assistant director of the Institute of Healthy Aging at University College London, Gems regularly runs experiments on Caenorhabditis elegans, a roundworm that is often used to study the biology of aging. In this case, he was testing the idea that a buildup of cellular damage caused by oxidation—technically, the chemical removal of electrons from a molecule by highly reactive compounds, such as free radicals—is the main mechanism behind aging....

By Katherine Rowland of Nature magazinePhysicians in India have identified a form of incurable tuberculosis there, raising further concerns over increasing drug resistance to the disease. Although reports call this latest form a “new entity,” researchers suggest that it is instead another development in a long-standing problem.The discovery makes India the third country in which a completely drug-resistant form of the disease has emerged, following cases documented in Italy in 2007 and Iran in 2009....

By Mary WisniewskiWASHINGTON, Illinois (Reuters) - Rescue workers in a small Illinois city raked by a powerful tornado were combing through the wreckage on Tuesday in the wake of a fast-moving storm that killed eight people in two states and may have caused $1 billion in property damage.The storm system triggered multiple tornadoes on Sunday that tore through the Midwestern United States, killing at least six people in Illinois and two people in Michigan....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. The word “phytosterol” may be unfamiliar but you’ve probably been eating them your whole life. At least I hope you have! Because a diet rich in phytosterols is a great way to reduce your risk of heart disease. And now, researchers suspect that phytosterols also play a role in prevention of Alzheimer’s disease as well....

As Negroes move in from the South and whites move out to the suburbs, a new pattern of segregation emerges in the big cities of the U.S., bringing with it significant economic, social and political problems The white and non-white citizens of the U. S. are being sorted out in a new pattern of segregation. In each of the major urban centers the story is the same: the better-off white families are moving out of the central cities into the suburbs; the ranks of the poor who remain are being swelled by Negroes from the South....

During a congressional hearing last week, Republican Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas asked a U.S. Forest Service official if her organization or the Bureau of Land Management could change the orbit of the moon or Earth to reverse the effects of human-caused climate change. That seems like a perfectly reasonable idea, doesn’t it? Let’s do it. First, we must take stock of what we have—the givens in what will be our equation for moving Earth....

Greenhouse gas emissions will spike today as temperatures along the East Coast approach triple digits and grid operators fire up nearly all of their power plants to help Americans beat the heat. The spike in emissions as temperatures rise is a characteristic of the nation’s electric grids. Many of the dirtiest coal- and oil-fired power plants sit idle for most of the year, because it doesn’t pay to run them. That changes on hot days....