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MINNEAPOLIS—Seven years ago, this city leapt to the front of the urban climate movement when it adopted an action plan for global warming. Hailed by environmentalists, the plan—one of the first passed by a major U.S. city—included reforms on issues ranging from energy efficiency to waste management. But activists say the effort launched without a critical component: the input of Minneapolis’ minority and low-income communities. Despite efforts to correct the problem, critics say the initial lack of inclusion laid the groundwork for a climate policy that doesn’t adequately address the needs of these same communities—many of which will be disproportionately affected by the consequences of a warming planet....

Fifty years ago a six-year-old boy named Michael Massimino sat in front of his family’s television on Long Island, N.Y., transfixed by the blurry black-and-white images of a man walking on the moon. Like millions of other children watching the Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 20, 1969, Massimino vowed to one day become an astronaut just like the Apollo 11 crewmembers he so revered—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins....

Key concepts Animals The environment Biodiversity Ecology Habitat Introduction It might seem impossible to estimate how many different bugs live in a nearby field—or how many types of birds live in a forest. But wildlife biologists often have to try to determine the number of different species in a given habitat. It might sound challenging but it is important. This can help us understand how healthy the habitat is. In this activity you’ll get to take on the role of a wildlife biologist by examining the biodiversity of bugs and other small invertebrates (such as spiders, centipedes and roly-polies) in your neighborhood or backyard using a homemade bug vacuum!...

Key concepts Mathematics Probability Chance Strategy Cards Introduction Have you ever been playing cards and wished you could use psychic powers to draw the card you wanted? You may not be psychic, but you can still have the power of probability on your side. In this activity you’ll investigate the probabilities of drawing specific types of cards from a deck. You’ll discover how math can help you avoid the dreaded phrase, “Go fish!...

Editor’s Note (3/20/18): This article is being resurfaced following the death of Sudan, the world’s last male northern white rhino. Only two females remain, pushing the subspecies closer to extinction. The brazen slaying and dehorning of an endangered white rhino in a wildlife preserve near Paris last month spurred widespread outrage. Mainstream media coverage blamed its usual suspects: Asian men who supposedly buy rhino horn as a crude form of Viagra....

Researchers studying deep-drilling cores have long noticed odd flecks of material in their samples, possibly from insects. They generally treated these as a distraction from their real work, and focused instead on pollen and spores as a continuous record for understanding past ecosystems. But a surprising abundance of those flecks in a recent sample from northern Germany has now led a team of scientists to pay closer attention. Writing in Science Advances, evolutionary biologist Timo van Eldijk and his co-authors described their find as the earliest fossil record of Lepidoptera, the insect order that includes butterflies and moths....

The Interior Department is seeking senior scientists to lead five regional hubs of the Climate Adaptation Science Centers program. But who wants to work for a Trump administration known for denying or downplaying climate science? And why is it filling the positions? Sharpen your pencils, applicants. Resumes are due tomorrow. According to a posting from the U.S. Geological Survey, Interior plans to fill top slots at five of eight regional climate adaptation centers housed at research universities from Hawaii to Massachusetts....

When a major heat wave engulfed western Europe in summer 2019, Paris and other cities recorded their highest temperatures ever. The furnacelike weather did not just cause sweaty brows—it also exacted a financial toll in infrastructure damage, lost labor productivity and potentially lower agricultural yields. The situation illustrates how even relatively wealthy countries can take an economic blow from climate change. That is a key message of a recent study from the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)....

In the summer of 2020 some people posted a listing for a fake Asian restaurant near my university on Google Maps and Instagram, with a name insulting to Asians and a menu that included horrible-sounding items such as “mouse tail salad” and “marinated ostrich foreheads.” The fake name, menu and reviews—even if they were intended as a joke—were all despicable examples of anti-Asian racism that has always been present in the U....

The American eel is at very high risk of extinction in the wild, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced last month. The organization added the eel to its Red List, where it joins the endangered Japanese eel and critically endangered European eel. In this first assessment of the American eel, the IUCN saw a troubling trend: a drop of around 50 percent in the population in the past several decades....

Wandering the aisles of a supermarket several years ago, one of us (Hebert) marveled at how the store could keep track of the array of merchandise simply by examining the varying order of thick and thin lines that make up a product’s barcode. Why, he mused, couldn’t the unique ordering of the four nucleic acids in a short strand of DNA be mined in a similar way to identify the legions of species on earth?...

We’re going to take a closer look at these stories, but please tell us what you think in the comment section. The Internet and Attention In the Atlantic Monthly, journalist Nicholas Carr wonders if “Google is making us stoopid [sic].” The search engine, in this instance, is an emblem of the Internet age, and Carr worries that the sheer abundance of information on the Web is short-circuiting our brains: The Net seems to be chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation....

The ST36 Zusanli acupuncture point is located just below the knee joint. This spot in mice—and it is hoped perhaps in humans—may be a critical entryway to gaining control over the often fatal inflammatory reactions that accompany systemic infections. Sepsis kills as many as 250,000 patients in the U.S. every year, some 9 percent of overall deaths. Antibiotics can control sepsis-related infection, but no current drugs have fda approval for counteracting the runaway immune response....

Every day when David Oddsson goes to work, the head of the Central Bank of Iceland must brave a crowd of jeering protesters, angry that the man they view as the chief architect of Iceland’s near-total financial collapse refuses to step down. This tiny country of 300,000 spent the past decade becoming a financial hub of Europe, loading its banks with so much debt that when they finally collapsed, their inability to pay back account holders in the U....

By Zachary Fagenson MIAMI (Reuters) - Fabien Cousteau, grandson of famed French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, emerged from the turquoise waters off the Florida Keys on Wednesday morning, after a record-breaking 31-day stay underwater with a team of scientists and documentary filmmakers. The younger Cousteau, 46, along with two “aquanauts,” took the 60-foot (18-meter) dive to Aquarius, a 43-foot-long (18-meter-long) laboratory submerged near a coral reef off Key Largo, on June 1 following years of preparation and delay....

By Natalie Grover (Reuters) - A handful of drugmakers are taking their first steps toward developing marijuana-based painkillers, alternatives to opioids that have led to widespread abuse and caused the U.S. health regulator to ask for a withdrawal of a popular drug this month. The cannabis plant has been used for decades to manage pain and there are increasingly sophisticated marijuana products available across 29 U.S. states, as well as in the District of Columbia, where medical marijuana is legal....

Earlier this month, former NSA employee Edward Snowden revealed the agency is collecting data on millions on Americans, from phone call durations to Facebook posts, all through a program codenamed PRISM. The resulting media backlash has revived the debates about internet privacy and government surveillance techniques, but questions remain: how is the National Security Agency taking in the data, and how much of a threat to our civil liberties does such data-collection efforts pose?...

A stressed-out and traumatized father can leave scars in his children. New research suggests this happens because sperm “learn” paternal experiences via a mysterious mode of intercellular communication in which small blebs break off one cell and fuse with another. Carrying proteins, lipids and nucleic acids, these particles ejected from a cell act like a postal system that extends to all parts of the body, releasing little packages known as extracellular vesicles....

How did it all begin? The origin of the cosmos is probably the biggest mystery in science—but amazingly, researchers do have some hard evidence to consult in their attempts to solve it. The cosmic microwave background (CMB), a microwave fog that pervades space, is the oldest light in existence—it was released about 13.7 billion years ago when the extremely hot and dense baby universe cooled enough to allow photons to travel freely for the first time....

By Richard Valdmanis BOSTON (Reuters) - Casting the fight against climate change as an urgent moral duty, Pope Francis in June urged the world to phase out highly-polluting fossil fuels. Yet in the heart of U.S. oil country several dioceses and other Catholic institutions are leasing out drilling rights to oil and gas companies to bolster their finances, Reuters has found. And in one archdiocese – Oklahoma City – Church officials have signed three new oil and gas leases since Francis’s missive on the environment, leasing documents show....