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Archaeologists have discovered once-hidden monuments and ancient cookie-cutter suburbs in southern Mexico’s Izapa kingdom. The kingdom, which flourished between 700 B.C. and 100 B.C., was mostly known for its capital, Izapa, where pyramids, plazas, ball courts and hundreds of elaborately carved monuments have been unearthed since the 1940s. But now archaeologists have confirmed that Izapa wasn’t a stand-alone city. It was surrounded by about 40 smaller towns. Each of these satellite settlements had a layout that copied the capital’s, according to a new study using aerial observations....

On August 30, 2017, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an immune-system based therapy, called CTL019, for children and young adults who have relapsed two or more times in treatments for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). This new treatment arose from the work by Carl June (C.J.) — Richard W. Vague Professor in Immunotherapy at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. He developed methods to engineer a patient’s T cells into so-called chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells, which recognize and kill a person’s unique cancer....

The world’s glaciers and Greenland’s ice sheet are melting, and fast. The situation in Antarctica is less clear, but scientists generally agree that the continent is losing ice. And as the planet continues to warm, these vast and long-frozen regions will continue to thaw and spill water into our rising seas. Researchers are rushing to answer crucial questions, such as figuring out the dynamics involved in the melt of these giant mantles of ice....

Clouds will respond to climate change in ways that further heat the planet, a new study suggests. The research, published yesterday in the journal Science, appears to solve one of of the biggest remaining mysteries in climate science: How well do computer climate models predict the behavior of clouds? That’s important because clouds can work to cool or heat the Earth, depending on the type of cloud and where it sits in the atmosphere....

In one of the largest and most rigorous clinical investigations of psychedelic drugs to date, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and New York University have found that a single dose of psilocybin—the psychoactive compound in “magic” mushrooms—substantially diminished depression and anxiety in patients with advanced cancer. Psychedelics were the subject of a flurry of serious medical research in the 1960s, when many scientists believed some of the mind-bending compounds held tremendous therapeutic promise for treating a number of conditions including severe mental health problems and alcohol addiction....

Dear EarthTalk: How effective have plastic bag bans and restrictions been on reducing plastic litter and other problems associated with their proliferation? And is it really better to use paper bags, which will just lead to more deforestation? —Peter Lindsey, New Canaan, Conn. Plastic bags, first introduced in the 1950s as a convenient way to store food, have since developed into a global scourge, littering roadsides, clogging sewer drains and landfills and getting ingested by animals and marine life....

MONTREAL—Rational calculations do not dictate financial decisions, as psychologists have revealed in recent years. Emotions often sway our spendthrift or miserly ways. In particular, positive feelings promote risk taking—gambling in Vegas, say, or going on a shopping spree—whereas bad moods prompt protective selling or saving. In some cases, our feelings may have an obvious origin: studies show that sunshine breeds stock surges, whereas clouds curtail purchasing. But much of what influences our spending is far more subtle—subliminal, in fact....

In a few short weeks, world leaders will assemble in Copenhagen for the much anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference. Their goal: to draft an agreement that will limit global warming, chiefly by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As the 12-day meeting gets closer, the chorus from jaded pundits and politicians gets louder: “It can’t be done.” Nonsense. The naysayers have two reasonable concerns. One: Countries will never agree on limits because they are out to protect their own interests, which differ....

The vast majority of the planet’s ice-free land surface – 83 per cent according to one study (pdf) – is now influenced by humans in some way or another. Where I live, in the British Isles, no part of the landscape is totally unaltered by people. The Lake District, for example, if left ungrazed by sheep, would revert to dense woodland on all but the highest peaks. Throughout the entire United Kingdom, the only species that have survived into the modern era are those that are able to coexist with human domination of the land: others, from beavers to wolves, have been extirpated entirely....

“Have you seen a 5-inch hailstone?” asks John Allen. “Seeing a stone like that is pretty amazing. Seeing it fall? Pretty amazing. Being in Oklahoma, when there’s a Porsche dealership outside the gas station you’re hiding (in), and hearing the hailstones hit Porsches? Kinda fun.” Allen, 27, is 6-foot-5 with reddish-brown hair and grey eyes behind rimless glasses. He leans forward, gesturing gracefully as he speaks, fingers rotating and pulling the air to illustrate his favorite subject: severe weather....

President Biden and European Union leaders want the rest of the world to join them in a new campaign to slash methane emissions. If successful, the initiative could go a long way toward blunting the impact of the planet-warming gas and curbing the worst effects of climate change. But the U.S.- and E.U.-led effort faces a long list of challenges, both on the international stage and back home. Those include buy-in from some of the world’s biggest emitters, the lack of a detailed plan and long-running concerns that methane emissions are notoriously underreported....

YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK, Calif. – On any given summer evening about 60 tourists gather in campground amphitheatres here for park ranger presentations. Astronomy, geology, human history, fire ecology are on the regular schedule of program topics. Wilderness safety and Yosemite’s notoriously aggressive black bears are also popular. But one July evening Yosemite ranger Matt Holly popped something different onto his projector screen: “Yosemite’s climate: Past…and Future?” What followed was a rare and relatively new occurrence in Yosemite Valley – a ranger program focused exclusively on how one of the jewels of America’s national parks system is responding to a changing climate....

People have always taken space for granted. It is just emptiness, after all—a backdrop to everything else. Time, likewise, simply ticks on incessantly. But if physicists have learned anything from the long slog to unify their theories, it is that space and time form a system of such staggering complexity that it may defy our most ardent efforts to understand. Albert Einstein saw what was coming as early as November 1916....

Heinrich M. Jaeger, a professor of physics at the University of Chicago, explains. The phenomenon by which large grains move up and small ones move down when shaking the can is called granular size separation. It is often referred to as “the Brazil nut effect,” since the same result occurs in a shaken can of mixed nuts. There are several physical mechanisms that can give rise to size separation. Obviously, the very finest (dust-like) grains might just fall down through the cracks left between the larger particles....

Modern laparoscopic surgeries may be minimally invasive, but they still require multiple incisions. To make laparoscopies even less intrusive, scientists and surgeons at Columbia University and Vanderbilt University have built a robot that can enter the body through a single 15-millimeter incision or through a natural opening like the mouth. Once inside the body the robot, which has not yet been tested in humans, unfolds like a NASA spaceship, communicates its position through a wire connected to an external computer, and follows instructions to advance, stop, tie sutures and perform other actions....

Two weeks ago, on a sparkling spring morning, we went trawling along Florida’s coastal waterway. But not for fish. We parked a 17-foot motor boat in a lagoon about 800 feet from the back lawn of The Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and pointed a 2-foot wireless antenna that resembled a potato gun toward the club. Within a minute, we spotted three weakly encrypted Wi-Fi networks. We could have hacked them in less than five minutes, but we refrained....

Was it a bioweapon from a virology institute? Had it been known before and already patented? Could homeopathic remedies help? All of these ideas about the headline-making novel coronavirus disease—now officially called COVID-19—are blatantly false. As with any recent outbreak, from Zika to Ebola, untruths and conspiracy theories spread as quickly as the pathogen itself. An emerging line of research exploring what might be called misinformation studies is trying to understand how and why fake beliefs arise during public health crises....

The federal government is ill-prepared to shoulder what could be a trillion-dollar fiscal crisis associated with extreme weather, floods, wildfires and other climate disasters through 2100, federal investigators have found. In the latest of a series of reports, the Government Accountability Office says that costs of disaster assistance to taxpayers since 2005 have swelled to nearly $500 billion—and they keep getting higher. “The federal budget, however, does not generally account for disaster assistance provided by Congress or the long-term impacts of climate change on existing federal infrastructure and programs,” GAO found in the 16-page report, which was presented as testimony to Congress by Alfredo Gómez, director of the office’s natural resources and environment team....

Thousands of people gathered in Honolulu, Hawaii, last week for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress to talk about Earth’s ecosystems, endangered species and climate change. The IUCN is the largest conservation organization in the world, consisting of about 1,300 governmental and nongovernmental organizations. The congress, which wrapped up Saturday, is a place for the group to set its agenda and debate environmental policy. This year, a record number of leaders from government, civil society, indigenous groups, business and academia converged on Oahu to discuss a “planet at a crossroads....

The discovery that ancient Mars could have supported microbes raises the tantalizing possibility that life may have evolved on the Red Planet before it took root on Earth. New observations by NASA’s Curiosity rover suggest that microbial life could have survived on Mars in the distant past, when the Red Planet was a warmer and wetter place, scientists announced Tuesday (March 12). It’s unclear exactly how long ago Mars’ habitability window opened up, researchers said....