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It’s only May, and it’s already shaping up to be a stressful summer for many western states. Low mountain snowpack is a big part of the problem. Both the mighty Rio Grande and the Colorado River are experiencing low flow in places, prompting concerns about everything from water shortages to the plight of suffocating fish. U.S. officials have already launched rescue missions for an endangered minnow in New Mexico, where parts of the Rio Grande have already started to run dry—an unusual event so early in the season....

Average speeds of the winners of the Tour de France took a quantum leap upward beginning in 1991, when recombinant erythropoietin, or r-EPO, apparently came into wide use in cycling. To control for yearly variance caused by course changes and weather, the author averaged the speeds over 14-year periods going backward and forward in time from 1991; the averages are plotted here. As the graph shows, in the period 1991–2004 the winners’ average speed jumped substantially (8 percent) over the corresponding speed in the period 1977–1990, an increase that cannot be accounted for by improvements in equipment, nutrition or training....

Researchers have shown that placebos can activate the body’s own painkilling opioids. In particular, saline injections can dampen pain if a person has recently received shots of morphine, a powerful analgesic, and has thereby associated such injections with pain relief. Could such a procedure be used to boost pain tolerance during athletic competitions? According to the prohibited drugs list of the World Anti-Doping Agency, morphine is illegal during athletic competition but not during training....

Want to market Nazi memorabilia, or recruit marchers for a far-right rally? Facebook’s self-service ad-buying platform had the right audience for you. Until this week, when we asked Facebook about it, the world’s largest social network enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of almost 2,300 people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world....

Dear EarthTalk: I have a new linoleum floor, which I chose partly for its ecofriendliness. How do I clean and maintain it without using harsh or toxic chemicals? —A. J. Maimbourg, via e-mail Whether you chose linoleum flooring for its no-fuss functionality, the soft feel underfoot, its distinctive look, or its green attributes, you definitely want to take care of your investment in an ecofriendly way for the sake of maintaining it for as long as possible while protecting the indoor air quality in your home....

The history of sex may have to be rewritten thanks to a group of unsightly, long-extinct fish called placoderms. A careful study of fossils of these armour-plated creatures, which gave rise to all current vertebrates with jaws, suggests that their descendants — our ancient ancestors — switched their sexual practices from internal to external fertilization, an event previously thought to be evolutionarily improbable. “This was totally unexpected,” says John Long, a palaeontologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and lead author of the study, published in Nature....

Delegates representing island states and others whose homelands are most threatened by rising seas will be pushing for the formal adoption of a long-overlooked goal, one that limits warming to less than 1.5°C, or 2.7°F. Such a goal would be an ambitious one. Some negotiators and onlookers already seem to have given up hope of limiting warming to less than 2°C, much less 1.5°C. Fossil fuel burning, deforestation and other climate-changing hallmarks of industrialization have elevated temperatures 1°C since the 19th century, pushing tides up more than 8 inches....

Methane concentrations in the atmosphere surged at a record rate in 2020, NOAA scientists announced yesterday. The Earth-warming gas increased by 14.7 parts per billion, the largest annual rise since scientists started taking measurements in the 1980s. It’s worrying news for the climate. Methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, especially in the short term. Over a 20-year period, its climate-warming potential is more than 80 times stronger than CO2....

Air travelers have more to hate about red-eye flights, where sleep is as ephemeral and satisfying as a bag of pretzels for dinner. Those overnight trips contribute more to atmospheric warming than daytime jetting. Scientists have long known that airplane condensation trails act to both cool and heat the atmosphere. Formed by jet engines’ hot exhaust, contrails act as thin cloud barriers that not only reflect sunlight but also prevent the earth’s heat from escaping into space....

We live, for better or for worse, in a competition-driven world. Rivalry powers our economy, sparks technological innovation and encourages academic discovery. But it also compels people to manipulate the system and commit crimes. Some figure it’s just easier—and even acceptable—to cheat. But what if instead of examining how people behave in a competitive setting, we wanted to understand the consequences of competition on their everyday behavior? That is exactly what Amos Schurr, a business and management professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Ilana Ritov, a psychologist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discuss in a study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Over a decade ago, I devised a test for detecting attitudes and biases operating below the level of a person’s awareness. Known as the Implicit Association Test, or IAT, it is presently the most widely used of the measures of implicit attitudes that have been developed by social psychologists over the past 25 years. It has been self-administered online by millions, many of whom have been surprised—sometimes unpleasantly—by evidence of their own unconscious attitudes and stereotypes regarding race, age, gender, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation....

The search for exoplanets—planets orbiting stars other than our sun—has been a booming subfield of astronomy for more than 20 years. Astronomers have used ground-based observatories as well as space telescopes like NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission to discover thousands of worlds in a broad range of sizes and orbits around a wide variety of stars, and are poised to find tens to hundreds of thousands more in years to come. Yet one key question remains unanswered: Of the billions of potentially habitable, potentially Earth-like planets that statistics tell us should exist in the Milky Way, how far off is “Earth Proxima”—the very closest one?...

By Lisa Maria Garza and Jim Forsyth DALLAS/SAN ANTONIO, May 30 (Reuters) - Rain caused flooding on roads in parts of Texas on Saturday, an official said, after severe weather killed at least 24 people during the week and prompted U.S. President Barack Obama to declare a disaster in the state. Texas has endured record rainfall in May. This week, flooding turned streets into rivers, ripped homes off foundations, swept over thousands of vehicles and trapped people in cars and houses....

Anyone who’s tried to run up a sand dune can tell you it’s not easy. The granular surface shifts with each clumsy step. Fortunately creatures such as the sidewinder rattlesnake that live full-time in sandy environs come well equipped for traversing such surfaces. The exact dynamics of how they slither from point A to B, particularly across sloping dunes, however, has been a mystery. At least until a team of physicists, zoologists and engineers took a closer look at exactly what takes place when scales meet sand....

Mining asteroids may sound like a concept ripped from science fiction, but a new law is aiming to make it a reality. On November 25 Pres. Barack Obama signed the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, a bill intended to spur private space exploration by limiting governmental regulations until September 2023. That time frame is meant to allow a learning period for private companies to develop the technology necessary for future goals such as space tourism, commercial spaceflight and space mining....

Every year, thousands of people die waiting for a new heart or kidney for transplant. 3D printing jelly-like biocompatible ‘inks’ laced with living cells could create new organs — from a pancreas to a retina — on demand. Scientists have already used 3D bioprinting to build new cartilage and skin for lab rats. Cartilage is the easiest tissue to work with, since it doesn’t need a blood supply, so in a few years, people with bad knees might go to the hospital and have new joints printed directly into their bodies....

A clinical trial of COVID-19 vaccines in Peru has sparked outrage and triggered a series of high-profile resignations at universities and in government. Politicians, researchers and some of their family members who were not enrolled as trial participants nevertheless received vaccines—breaching standard protocols. Investigations are ongoing as the country struggles to inoculate its general population with limited doses. The scandal emerged on 10 February, when local media revealed that in October 2020, then-president Martín Vizcarra had received two doses of a vaccine developed by the Chinese state-owned pharmaceutical group Sinopharm....

Seabirds are “sentinels” of ocean health. If marine ecosystems are suffering, the birds will be among the first to show it. Now a major study finds that seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere are already struggling. And without extra precautions, those in the Southern Hemisphere might be next. The findings point to broader patterns of environmental change across the world’s oceans. Climate change, combined with pollution, overfishing and other human activities, is steadily altering marine food webs....

A sleeping giant at the center of a galaxy has awoken: A normally dormant, monster black hole has been found shredding a star that ventured too close to the cosmic beast. This stellar slaughter was spotted by scientists who study the X-rays bouncing around the swirling disk of matter surrounding the giant black hole. The method used to analyze this event — named Swift J1644+57 — could help solve the mystery of how the largest black holes in the universe grew to such enormous sizes, the authors of the new research said....

Notice that, even as you fixate on the screen in front of you, you can still shift your attention to different regions in your peripheries. For decades, cognitive scientists have conceptualized attention as akin to a shifting spotlight that “illuminates” regions it shines upon, or as a zoom lens, focusing on things so that we see them in finer detail. These metaphors are commonplace because they capture the intuition that attention illuminates or sharpens things, and thus, enhances our perception of them....