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The 2010s were almost certainly the hottest decade on record — and it showed. The world burned, melted and flooded. Heat waves smashed temperature records around the globe. Glaciers lost ice at accelerating rates. Sea levels continued to swell. At the same time, scientists have diligently worked to untangle the chaos of a rapidly warming planet. In the past decade, scientists substantially improved their ability to draw connections between climate change and extreme weather events....

Despite spending countless hours of her PhD at Stanford making visits to remote stretches of Alaska, poring over yellow cedar measurements and photos and ultimately publishing her findings, Lauren Oakes was about to experience her data in a new way. Driving for a weekend trip to the Sierras, she turned the volume way up in her car and hit play. A cascading piano was joined by a flute, cello and other instruments....

Two Ebola drugs have proven so effective in a clinical trial that researchers will make the treatments available to anyone infected with the virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where Ebola has killed nearly 1,900 people over the past year. The survival rate for people who received either drug shortly after infection, when levels of the virus in their blood were low, was 90%. “It’s really good news,” says Sabue Mulangu, an infectious-disease researcher at the National Institute for Biomedical Research (INRB) in Kinshasa in the DRC, and an investigator on the trial....

July 4, 1776: the United States declared independence from Britain. July 20, 1969: humans landed on the moon. November 9, 1989: the Berlin Wall came down. Will we look back on June 29, 2007, as one of those watershed dates? Only time will tell, but the day the first iPhone came out certainly changed our psyches forever. Studies, magazine articles, and cultural rumblings tell us that technology is making us more anxious....

On March 17 Paul Steinhardt, a physicist at Princeton University, abandoned a theory he’d been championing for more than a decade. Known as the “ekpyrotic universe” model, it was an alternative to the prevailing theory of inflation, which says the cosmos expanded faster than the speed of light in the first fraction of a fraction of a second of the big bang. If inflation is true, then the process should have released a burst of gravitational waves; in Steinhardt’s model, they shouldn’t exist....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. What should a self-driving car do when a nearby vehicle is swerving unpredictably back and forth on the road, as if its driver were drunk? What about encountering a vehicle driving the wrong way? Before autonomous cars are on the road, everyone should know how they’ll respond in unexpected situations. I develop, test and deploy autonomous shuttles, identifying methods to ensure self-driving vehicles are safe and reliable....

A joke among researchers in the field of male contraception is that a clinically approved alternative to condoms or vasectomy has been five to 10 years away for the past 40 years. The so-close-yet-so-far state of male contraceptive development has persisted in large part because of three serious hurdles: the technical challenges of keeping millions of sperm at bay, the stringent safety standards that a drug intended for long-term use in healthy people must meet, and, ultimately, the question of whether men will use it....

The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control by Walter Mischel Little, Brown, 2014 One marshmallow now or two later? This simple choice has agonized preschoolers since the 1960s, when psychologist Mischel began running his famous experiment to test children’s ability to delay gratification. It turns out that a kid’s performance on this willpower test predicts far-reaching outcomes such as SAT scores, relationship satisfaction and even body-mass index later in life. The good news is that the ability to resist instant gratification for longer-term rewards is not innate but can be learned....

A little over a year ago, a 25-year-old woman visited University Hospital Birmingham in England complaining of frequent 10-second bouts of nausea and lightheadedness, which was sometimes so intense it caused her to pass out. “She was very thin, she was pale, a very sensible young woman,” says Una Martin, a clinical pharmacologist at the hospital assigned to the case shortly after the woman’s first visit. She had no history of smoking, heavy drinking or psychiatric disorders....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China has further revised up its solar power development target for 2015 by 50 percent from its previous plan, state media reported on Thursday. The government has set a target for installed solar power generating capacity to reach 15 gigawatts by 2015 and wind power capacity to hit 100 GW, China National Radio reported, citing an announcement from the National Energy Administration. The ambitious move may have been encouraged by a rapid increase in solar power installation in recent months after the government unified grid feed-in tariffs for solar projects for the first time in July, and offered a higher price for projects that would be put into operation before the year end....

This has been a big week in Alzheimer’s news as scientists put together a clearer picture than ever before of how the disease affects the brain. Three recently published studies have detected the disease with new technologies, hinted at its prevalence, and described at last how it makes its lethal progress through the brain. The existence of two forms of Alzheimer’s—early- and late-onset—has long baffled scientists. Of the estimated five million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer’s, only a few thousand are diagnosed with an early-onset form of the affliction, which affects people before the age of 65....

Talk about spooky action at a distance. Without any other molecules to guide them, double helices of DNA with identical sequences can recognize one another from a distance and even gather together. That DNA bases attract is not a surprise, because base pairs are complementary like right- and left-handed gloves: adenine binds with thymine, cytosine with guanine. But when bound in a double-helix form, these bases are tucked away, hidden behind highly electrically charged strings of sugars and phosphates....

After 16 years NASA has finally launched GLAST, the Gamma-ray Large Area Telescope, to begin a unique and far-ranging survey of extreme events in our galaxy and beyond. At 12:05 Eastern time today, a Delta 2 rocket carrying GLAST at its pinnacle blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. After GLAST enters orbit, mission scientists will spend the next couple months switching on its systems and learning to interpret the data it collects....

Back in the days when better living through chemistry was a promise, not a bitter irony, nylon stockings replaced silk, refrigerators edged out iceboxes, and Americans became increasingly dependent on man-made materials. Today nearly everything we touch—clothing, furniture, carpeting, cabinets, lightbulbs, paper, toothpaste, baby teethers, iPhones, you name it—is synthetic. The harmful side effects of industrialization—smoggy air, Superfund sites, mercury-tainted fish, and on and on—have often seemed a necessary trade-off....

Every spring I bring my students to the desert of northwestern New Mexico, just north of Chaco Canyon, where the ancestral Pueblo people built a great city out of rocks a millennium ago. As we hike across the pastel-striped badlands, we can’t help but tread on dinosaur bones. The ground is littered with busted Tyrannosaurus rex limbs and chunks of vertebrae that anchored the lofty necks of sauropods some 66.9 million years ago during the Cretaceous period....

Explosive light and sound followed. Foo Fighters’ hard-driving “Bridge Burning” started cranking while Nagura’s blade changed into a hard-rocking guitar. Nagura’s left hand fingered the frets as her right arm windmilled Townshend-style. Channeling Hendrix, Nagura ran across the stage as if pulled by her instrument, black tresses whipping back and forth. Bent over backward, toward the audience, she then played the guitar behind her head. The performance was exhausting but worth it: Nagura won the coveted 2014 Air Guitar World Championship....

Whenever national elections occur, debates arise over which voting technology is most accurate and least susceptible to tampering. The arguments have been waged ever since mechanical machines arrived more than a century ago as an alternative to paper ballots. Lever machines dominated U.S. polling places from the 1930s through the 1980s but are now used only in New York State, having been gradually replaced by optical scanners and touch screens. The scanners are similar to equipment used to score standardized tests....

TOKYO—An unusual employee started last week at the upscale Mitsukoshi department store here. Her name is Aiko Chihira and she hails from Kawasaki, Japan, just south of the city. This temp is a tireless worker and gives an excellent, detailed spiel about the 12-story flagship store and its upcoming events. But even by her bosses’ admission, she is not a very good listener. In fact, although she speaks fluent Japanese—and even can do Japanese sign language—questions from customers fall on deaf ears....

The happy news for the British monarchy is that Kate Middleton, the duchess of Cambridge, is with child—a potential heir to the throne. Sadly, the royal isn’t having an easy go of her first pregnancy. Middleton has been diagnosed with hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), which is a dangerous type of morning sickness. HG affects anywhere between 0.2 to 2 percent of all pregnant women in developed countries. The disease is associated with nausea and vomiting so severe that women can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result....

“The Council of the American Meteorological Society recently summed up the present evidence for the effectiveness of cloud-seeding. Its verdict: Not proven. Conditions favorable for artificial rainmaking, the statement points out, are very much the same as those which usually lead to natural rain. Says the Council: ‘Cloud-seeding acts only to trigger the release of precipitation from existing clouds.’ There appears to be no convincing evidence that ground-based silver iodide generators can increase rainfall in flat country....