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Leaders from 90 world “megacities” meeting in Mexico City this week are sending a message that they plan to act on climate change—whatever national leaders do. The sixth C40 Mayors Summit is occurring one year after the landmark conference in Paris, at which nearly 200 countries agreed to take steps to limit warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels. But it is also taking place in the shadow of last month’s election of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised to “cancel” U....

Negotiators gathered in Bangkok this week are under the gun. Climate talks held in May in Bonn, Germany, didn’t go as planned, with old political fault lines stymieing progress toward the Paris Agreement rulebook that’s due to be more or less completed at December talks in Poland. Thus the need for this week’s bonus session in the Thai capital. Parties hope they can make significant progress resolving entrenched differences in just six days....

Over the past 20 years educators have fought over the best way to teach numbers to kids. Advocates of traditional math tout the practice of algorithms and teacher-centered learning, whereas reform-math proponents focus on underlying concepts and student inquiry. In the face of continued declining scores in the U.S., these so-called math wars have heated up recently with the circulation of petitions, the release of contested curriculum guidelines and, in one case, the filing of a lawsuit....

Stephan Lewandowsky was deep in denial. Nearly 10 years ago the cognitive scientist threw himself into a study of why some people refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming and humans are responsible. As he delved into this climate change denialism, Lewandowsky, then at the University of Western Australia, discovered that many of the naysayers also believed in outlandish plots, such as the idea that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax created by the American government....

Curious about the more than 1.2 billion people currently on Facebook? A new Web site lets you zoom in on each one. Designed by self-dubbed creative technologist Natalia Rojas, The Faces of Facebook starts off with a running count of Facebook’s growing membership, with each person represented by a tiny dot. Click anywhere amid the sea of dots, and the page drills down to reveal thumbnails of the faces of a handful of Facebook users....

To the human ear, the buzz of the honeybee can sound like one unchanging hum. Yet a group of researchers hopes that decoding tiny variations in the noise could help halt the catastrophic decline in the world’s honeybee population. The researchers, led by a team at Nottingham Trent University in England, believe the changing sounds from a hive indicate swings in the bees’ state of health and that high-tech eavesdropping could provide beekeepers with early-warning signals....

As the 2005 school year got underway, a new requirement in a Pennsylvania public school district mandated that all 9th-grade biology students listen to a statement questioning the validity of evolutionary theory and promoting intelligent design. Eleven parents of students in the Dover Area School District sued the local school board in protest. Four months later a Republican judge in a Pennsylvania federal court ruled in favor of the parents, issuing an eloquent defense of evolutionary theory—and a scathing rebuke to those who support intelligent design (ID) as a scientific alternative....

The Trump administration on Tuesday detailed how it will roll out the delivery of donated HIV prevention drugs to people who should be taking them but do not have prescription drug coverage. Pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP drugs, which are taken daily, have been shown to be highly effective at preventing infection, but they are expensive and too few people at risk use them. The goal of the new program, called “Ready, Set, PrEP” and unveiled by Alex Azar, secretary of health and human services, is to expand both access and use....

Think about the last time you were about to interview for a job, speak in front of an audience, or go on a first date. To quell your nerves, chances are you spent time preparing – reading up on the company, reviewing your slides, practicing your charming patter. People facing situations that induce anxiety typically take comfort in engaging in preparatory activities, inducing a feeling of being back in control and reducing uncertainty....

A new global agreement clinched this weekend to curtail use of a class of highly warming chemicals used in air conditioning and refrigeration puts a check next to the last major item on President Obama’s climate diplomacy bucket list. The amendment to the Montreal Protocol phasing down heat-trapping hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which was adopted in the early hours of Saturday in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, is in part the result of 7 ½ years of lobbying and maneuvering by the Obama administration, environmental advocacy community and U....

A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now 6 ½ years away from “First Plasma,” officials announced. Yesterday, dignitaries attended a components handover ceremony at the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in southern France. The ITER project is an experiment aimed at reaching the next stage in the evolution of nuclear energy as a means of generating emissions-free electricity. The section recently installed—the cryostat base and lower cylinder—paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core....

American’s four National Airborne Operations Center planes, each a militarized Boeing 747-200 called an E-4B, offers senior military leaders the most complete and sophisticated airborne communications platform in the world.(Credit:Daniel Terdiman/CNET)OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. – I’ve always loved 747s and just about everything about them. But the one I’m on right now, known as the Doomsday plane, has a very different – and very somber – purpose than most of Boeing’s iconic jumbo jets....

Deadly bacteria are spreading through the oceans as waters warm up, and are increasing infection risks, according to a new study. Multiple species of rod-shaped Vibrio bacteria live in the world’s oceans, and their populations rise and fall based on many different variables, changing the likelihood of making people sick. A report published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesexamined the role of the changing climate in Vibrio infections....

By James Mitchell Crow of Nature magazineFossilized dinosaur tracks that dot a remote 80-kilometre stretch of Western Australia’s coastline are under threat from a proposed natural gas facility, say paleontologists.The tracks were made by multiple species of sauropod, theropod and ornithopod dinosaurs as they walked across mud flats around 130 million years ago. The full extent of the tracks was only revealed in 1994, and they are yet to be thoroughly documented and mapped, owing to their isolated location....

Donald A. Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto, explains. People with arthritis often believe that changes in the weather cause flare-ups of their disease. Decades of medical research, however, have failed to establish an objective relationship between arthritis severity and weather patterns. Moreover, detailed interviews with specific patients have yielded mostly anecdotes, and those who move to drier climates do not report major relief. The specific idea of dampness affecting arthritis symptoms seems an unlikely mechanism for a number of reasons....

Jeremy Barnes, professor of health promotion at Southeast Missouri State University, replies. Body weight depends on a multitude of factors, and, as you might imagine, both lifestyle and genetics play critical roles. The key to weight control is balancing energy intake with energy expenditure, a relationship that is often referred to as the energy balance equation. Energy input comes from the food and drink we consume and is usually measured in kilocalories (kcal)....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Have you noticed more cats riding in strollers lately? Or bumper stickers that read, “I love my granddogs”? You’re not imagining it. More people are investing serious time, money and attention in their pets. It looks an awful lot like parenting, but of pets, not people. Can this kind of caregiving toward animals really be considered parenting?...

Global average temperatures are now higher than they have been for about 75% of the past 11,300 years, a study suggests. And if climate models are any indication, by the end of this century they will be the highest ever since the end of the most recent ice age. Instrumental records of climate extend back to only the late nineteenth century. Beyond that, scientists depend on analyses of natural chronicles such as tree rings and isotope ratios in cave formations....

Last Friday, Sebastian Vivancos embarked on the journey of a lifetime: He was headed to Antarctica. In Punta Arenas, Chile, Vivancos, a recent graduate of Columbia University, boarded the Laurence M. Gould, an icebreaker that would take him and others across the Drake Passage and to the National Science Foundation’s Palmer Station. “The trip across was incredible,” Vivancos wrote in an email. “The wind howls incessantly, the huge waves crash against the side of the ship rocking it back and forth....

Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid struck Earth and wiped out an estimated 75 percent of life. It is an event that infamously caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, which leads one to wonder: How did the ancestors of modern-day birds survive when all their relatives perished? A new study published in Current Biology hypothesizes that some birdlike dinosaurs lived because they had toothless beaks and could subsist off fire-resistant seeds when the food sources of most other species disappeared....