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Botanist Wesley Knapp has a reputation for finding lost plants. In 2016 Knapp’s rediscovery of a rare Maryland flower called Solidago rupestris—last seen more than 100 years ago—resulted in headlines calling him “the Indiana Jones of botany.” Now Knapp has contributed to a new discovery—the identity of a plant species that’s been hiding under experts’ eyes and noses for decades. It’s probably been extinct for much of that time. The lost plant, a three-foot-tall daisy called Marshallia grandiflora, grew in just two western North Carolina counties and hasn’t been officially seen since 1919, according to a paper published this month in the journal Phytotaxa....

The genome of a famous 8,500-year-old North American skeleton, known as Kennewick Man, shows that he is closely related to Native American tribes that have for decades been seeking to bury his bones. The finding, reported today in Nature, seems likely to rekindle a legal dispute between the tribes and the researchers who want to keep studying the skeleton. Yet it comes at a time when many scientists—including those studying Kennewick Man—are trying to move past such controversies by inviting Native Americans to take part in their research....

How can global warming be traced to CO2? —J. POPE, WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. Pieter Tans, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Earth System Research Laboratory, explains: Although carbon dioxide is just a minor constituent of the atmosphere, it is one of the few atmospheric gases capable of trapping the heat radiating from the earth. At the earth’s surface, visible radiation from the sun is absorbed, which causes heating....

The record piles of snow across California’s Sierra Nevada are melting away, exposing once again its breathtaking alpine meadows. As temperatures warm the moist soil, the meadows quicken, cycling carbon from the ground into the atmosphere and back again in a pattern essential to the planet’s health. Scientists and land managers are heading into the mountains to measure the greenhouse gas activity at 16 hand-picked meadows—some recently restored, others degraded from a century of grazing and logging....

For centuries people have painted cities as unnatural human conglomerations, blighted by pathologies such as public health crises, aggression and exorbitant costs of living. Why, then, do people throughout the world keep leaving the countryside for the town? Research that has been forming a multidisciplinary science of cities is beginning to reveal the answer: cities concentrate, accelerate, and diversify social and economic activity. The numbers show that urban dwellers produce more inventions and create more opportunities for economic growth....

President Trump loves “beautiful” factories but is worried about “fumes” from wind turbines. Joe Biden wouldn’t ban fracking but wants to “transition” away from it. Yesterday’s presidential debate saw one of the most substantive exchanges on climate policy in the history of general election matchups, largely because it’s an issue that rarely gets such valuable airtime. The climate section of the roughly 90-minute event clocked in at about 10 minutes and delved into topics rarely heard on the presidential debate stage, just 12 days before the election....

This month a cosmic visitor is gracing the skies. A comet swept past the sun on July 3, and it has since become visible to the naked eye. The rare opportunity to glimpse the chunk of ancient ice from the outer solar system should continue next week, when astronomers hope it will become even brighter. Scientists using the Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) space telescope first spotted the comet as it hurtled toward the sun on March 27....

The items below are highlights from the free newsletter, “Smart, useful, science stuff about COVID-19.” To receive newsletter issues daily in your inbox, sign up here. In a 2/19/21 newsletter for The New York Times, David Leonhardt writes that some cautionary public health messages about COVID-19 vaccines, such as messages about risks, uncertainties, caveats and side effects — all of which he calls “vaccine alarmism” — are “fundamentally misleading.” Some researchers and journalists are “instinctively skeptical and cautious,” he writes, which has led to public health messages that “emphasize uncertainty and potential future bad news....

There are many types of touch. A cold splash of water, the tug of a strong breeze or the heat and heft of your coffee mug will each play on your skin in a different way. Within your skin is an array of touch sensors, each associated with nerve fibers that connect to the central nervous system. These sensors comprise specialized nerve endings and skin cells. Along with the fibers, they translate our physical interactions with the world into electrical signals that our brain can process....

By Toni Clarke (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday made good on its proposal to effectively ban artificial trans fats from a wide range of processed foods, from microwave popcorn to frozen pizza, saying they raise the risk of heart disease. Under new FDA regulations, partially hydrogenated oils, which have been shown to raise LDL cholesterol, will be considered food additives that cannot be used unless authorized by the FDA....

For such a petite creature, the 1.2-meter-tall “Ardi” (Ardipithecus ramidus) has made big waves in the paleoanthropology world. The momentous find—announced 15 years ago and formally described in Science this October—has deepened academic debates about when bipedalism evolved, what our last common ancestor with chimpanzees looked like, and how some ancient primates gave way to modern humans. “This is a fascinating fossil no matter what side you come down on,” says William Jungers, a professor and chairman of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at the Stony Brook University Medical Center in Long, Island, N....

Thanks to Savvy Psychologist listener Cindy Jossart of Webster City, Iowa for the idea for this week’s podcast. With darkness in their hearts, ice water in their veins, and snake-charming smiles on their faces, psychopaths make up anywhere from 0.6% to 4% of the population. This personality disorder affects men more frequently than women. It’s been documented in cultures the world over. Here’s a great icebreaker for your next cocktail party: the Native Alaskan peoples call psychopaths “kunlangeta....

Soon after superstorm Sandy struck New York and New Jersey a year ago today, the public became aware that a half-dozen U.S. weather models had incorrectly predicted that the storm coming up the coast would veer northeast out to sea. Only the so-called European model predicted that Sandy would “turn left” and threaten the coast of the nation’s most populous city and the surrounding metropolitan area. Less was heard about another set of models that had attempted to predict how high the storm surge would be, a rough guide to how much coastal land might be flooded....

JANUARY’S ISSUE drew letters addressing articles that ranged from an exploration of how motherhood changes the structure of the female brain in “The Maternal Brain,” by Craig Howard Kinsley and Kelly G. Lambert, to the sociopolitical and psychological factors that drive individuals to become suicide bombers in “Murdercide,” by Skeptic columnist Michael Shermer. The topic of animal experimentation, covered in “Saving Animals and People” [SA Perspectives] and “Protecting More than Animals,” by Alan M....

Bacon lovers of the world, rejoice! Or at the least take solace that your beloved pork belly may be better for the environment in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than the lettuce that accompanies it on the classic BLT. This is according to a new study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who found that if Americans were to switch their diets to fall in line with the Agriculture Department’s 2010 dietary recommendations, it would result in a 38 percent increase in energy use, 10 percent bump in water use and a 6 percent increase in greenhouse gas emissions....

Supercomputers have long been an indispensable, albeit expensive, tool for researchers who need to make sense of vast amounts of data. One way that researchers have begun to make high-speed computing more powerful and also more affordable is to build systems that split up workloads among fast, highly parallel graphics processing units (GPUs) and general-purpose central processing units (CPUs). There is, however, a problem with building these co-processed computing hot rods: A common programming interface for the different GPU models has not been available....

A team of European astronomers has located what may be the largest collection of planets discovered to date outside our own solar system. At least five extrasolar planets, and possibly two more, orbit the sunlike star HD 10180 some 125 light-years away, according to a new study that has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. (A PDF of the paper is available here.) One other planetary system, encircling the star 55 Cnc, hosts five planets, but a six-world system would be unprecedented....

Dear EarthTalk: How can I determine if it is more eco-friendly to fly or drive somewhere? – Christine Matthews, Washington, DC The simple answer is that driving in a relatively fuel efficient car (25-30 miles per gallon) usually generates fewer greenhouse gas emissions than flying. In assessing the global warming impact of a trip from Philadelphia to Boston (about 300 miles), the environmental news website Grist.org calculates that driving would generate about 104 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2)—the leading greenhouse gas—per typical medium-sized car, regardless of the number of passengers, while flying on a commercial jet would produce some 184 kilograms of CO2 per passenger....

Imagine you are walking and encounter a barrier, such as a hill or a wall. The only way to make it to the other side is to climb all the way up and over it. Yet what if you had the same superpowers as quantum particles? The strange laws of quantum mechanics allow particles to sometimes bust through barriers like they are not there, even if the particles cannot climb over whatever is in their path....

CHICAGO — Combating climate change with investment in renewable power is a main part of Hillary Clinton’s economic platform, the campaign’s political director said yesterday. “When you think about her economic message, this is one of the key drivers to that, so it’s one of the four pillars or five pillars that she’s talked about,” Amanda Renteria said. “What we’ve seen across the board and as she’s traveled in Iowa and Pennsylvania is you have wind turbines, you have this opportunity in manufacturing in clean energy....