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The Obama administration’s nearly $4 billion proposal to boost automated vehicles could help cut back overall fuel use, researchers cautiously predict. Cars that require little to no human input appear ever closer to reality as automakers like Audi AG, BMW AG, Ford Motor Co. and Toyota Motor Corp. continue developing their own versions of the technology and Google Inc. sends driverless cars around the streets of California. But whether that will lead to a less-congested transportation system—saving fuel and cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions—remains to be seen, according to be transportation experts....

The basic proposition behind the science of climate change is so firmly rooted in the laws of physics that no reasonable person can dispute it. All other things being equal, adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere—by, for example, burning millions of tons of oil, coal and natural gas—will make it warm up. That, as the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Svante Arrhenius first explained in 1896, is because CO2 is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun, which heats the planet during the day....

On a recent morning, in Lower Manhattan, 20 scientists, including me, gathered for a private screening of the new film Don’t Look Up, followed by lunch with the film’s director, Adam McKay. The film’s plot is simple. An astronomy graduate student, Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), and her professor, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), discover a new comet and realize that it will strike the Earth in six months. It is about nine kilometers across, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago....

Freshly brewed coffee, rancid meat, the scent of a mother, an alarming waft of smoke—good or bad, smell is a powerful sense, capable of rousing remote memories, guiding behaviors and influencing moods. Scientists have long suspected that the immense diversity in human olfactory experience results at least partly from heredity, and now a research team has shown that the perception of specific odors can indeed be traced to one’s genes. Beyond connecting the dots between genes and odors, these findings raise intriguing questions about human evolution....

When it is necessary to sniff out a trail–be it to a bomb, a drug stash or even to a pie sitting on a windowsill–the task is normally better left to our canine companions. And while our four-legged friends still hold the crown for tracking scents, a new study published in this week’s issue of Nature Neuroscience proves that humans may not be bloodhounds, but they can follow a scent–and they get better with training....

Expectations are running high that some time next year astronomers using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft will announce the discovery that planet hunters have been waiting for: the first Earth-size exoplanet found in a region around a sunlike star where life could flourish. That exoplanet will almost certainly lie too far from Earth to be scrutinized, but it will nonetheless throw into high gear a search for the fingerprints of life—the chemical compounds that could indicate whether an exoplanet in the habitable zone, the life-friendly region where liquid water can survive, actually harbors life....

A little over a decade ago, the major players in the environmental movement tried to take on Florida’s sugar producers. The industry’s fertilizers were polluting the Everglades, and the environmentalists asked Florida voters to approve a penny-per-pound tax on sugar companies that would yield $35 million a year for cleanup work. But “Big Sugar” responded with a multimillion-dollar campaign to portray the environmentalists as white elitists attempting to weaken an industry that employed blacks and Latinos....

DNA that makes germs resistant against medicines may increasingly be polluting water, from rivers all the way to the faucet. Scientists caution these contaminants, if not cleansed, could exacerbate the growing problem of drug resistance among potentially harmful microbes. The genes join a long list of contaminants being found in water, posing a challenge for devising an effective means of treatment. Currently the World Health Organization reports that drug-resistant germs infect more than two million people in the U....

Jerry Paros is worried about the geological time bomb ticking away just off the coast near his home in Washington state. But unlike the millions of people who fear the earthquake and tsunami that will one day rock that region, Paros is doing something about it. His company made millions of dollars building exquisitely precise quartz sensors for oil, gas and other industry applications. Now he wants to use them to save the world from natural disasters....

Feeling confident after recent successful attempts to control rainfall in the country, China is planning to seed clouds around the 16th Asian Games next year with chemicals that will keep it from raining on its parade, or at least the games’ opening and closing ceremonies. Even though the November 2010 games to be held in Guangzhou’s 80,000-seat Guangdong Olympic Stadium will take place during southern China’s supposed dry season, the Olympic Council of Asia, the continent’s main sports governing body, announced earlier this week that liquid nitrogen, dry ice and silver iodide will be used to all but eliminate any chance of precipitation....

Scientific American presents The Dog Trainer by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. A listener, Bill, writes: “We have 3 girls, ages 7, 4, and 2, who have never been around dogs. Our 7-year-old is on the autism spectrum and we’ve heard how a dog can be great therapy treatment for kids with autism. So, after months of discussion, research, and persistence from the girls, we got a dog....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Every week, I wait for the cold steel bars to close behind me, for count to be called, and for men who have years—maybe the rest of their lives—to spend in this prison to come talk with me. I am a clinical psychologist who studies chronic antisocial behavior. My staff and I converted an office in a Connecticut state prison into research space that allows us to measure neural and behavioral responses....

An outbreak of a deadly brain infection is raising questions about whether climate change has affected the spread of the mosquito species that carry the disease. There have been 31 confirmed cases of Eastern equine encephalitis, including nine deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making it the worst outbreak in decades. Numbers released yesterday show the majority of cases have come out of Massachusetts, with 12 reported cases and three deaths....

This story was originally published by Inside Science News Service. (ISNS) – It’s tempting to call some Olympic events, such as wrestling, judo and taekwondo, “messy sports” because it’s difficult to quantify exactly how much any given factor contributes to success in each competition. Meredith Miller, the high performance director of USA Taekwondo, is trying to clean things up by developing statistics for the sport, and also a better understanding of the “magnetic socks” integral to the martial art’s electronic scoring system....

COVID-19 has dramatically changed life in every corner of the world. The deadly contagion has prompted lockdowns and various degrees of social distancing, causing much of public life to grind to a halt. All nations have felt some impact in many different ways. In terms of economic effects, the U.S. has seen record unemployment rates. But people living in low- and middle-income countries have been hit especially hard by the COVID downturn—to the point that nearly half of them may now face some level of food insecurity—according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances....

Congressional partisans on both sides of the climate wars are fortifying their positions as landmark U.N. negotiations in Paris near. For House and Senate Republican majorities, that means making the case to the world as forcefully as possible that White House pledges of aid and greenhouse gas emissions reductions are unlikely to materialize—and shouldn’t be counted on in any agreement. Climate advocates, meanwhile, are preparing to counter that message by traveling to Paris to help President Obama and his Cabinet achieve their long-sought goal of facilitating a deal that allows for U....

A dancer shrouded in shades of blue rises to her feet and steps forward on stage. Under a spotlight, she gazes at her partner: a tall, sleek robotic arm. As they dance together, the machine’s fluid movements make it seem less stereotypically robotic—and, researchers hope, more trustworthy. “When a human moves one joint, it isn’t the only thing that moves. The rest of our body follows along,” says Amit Rogel, a music technology graduate researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology....

When Stephen Hawking was quoted earlier this year as saying that “there are no black holes,” he wasn’t really talking about black holes. At least not about black holes as you or I imagine them—astrophysical objects that suck in everything, even light. Those, everyone agrees, are just as black as ever. Hawking’s quip instead concerns black holes in a highly theoretical sense. Like many other theorists, Hawking has been trying to understand a paradox eating at the heart of physics....

A child born to an HIV-infected mother in Mississippi may be cured after a swiftly administered course of drugs. A number of factors make the child’s case unique, however, and clinicians caution that we have not discovered a general cure for HIV yet. Still, the medical first may hint at ways to fight the AIDS-causing virus. An HIV cure has been elusive because the virus has ways of hiding within the body....