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Water scarcity is expected to increase globally as populations boom and climate change sharpens uncertainty around the resource’s availability, according to a report by the World Bank. The conclusion adds to a growing body of research, and it comes days before this year’s Climate Action 2016 summit in Washington, D.C. The report, titled “High and Dry: Climate Change, Water, and the Economy,” highlights the importance of water to human health, agriculture and geopolitical stability....

Paleontologist Michael Habib studies the biomechanics of pterosaurs, the biggest of which—at 550 pounds and with a 34-foot wingspan—were the size of modern-day fighter jets. They were the largest flying animals ever to exist and sported anatomy different from any bird or bat. This makes them a unique model for flight mechanics, particularly for large aircraft. To model how pterosaurs flew, Habib combines principles of physics and vertebrate anatomy with fossil data....

The human body harbors at least 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells. Collectively known as the microbiome, this community may play a role in regulating one’s risk of obesity, asthma and allergies. Now some researchers are wondering if the microbiome may have a part in an even more crucial process: mate selection and, ultimately, evolution. The best evidence that the microbiome may play this critical role comes from studies of insects....

By Maggie Lu YueyangSYDNEY (Reuters) - A Chinese helicopter has reached a Russian ship stranded in Antarctica for nine days and is beginning to pick up 52 passengers who spent Christmas and the New Year trapped in ice, the expedition leader said on Thursday.The helicopter from the Chinese icebreaker Snow Dragon will take all the passengers from the ice-bound Akademik Shokalskiy and transfer them to an Australian Antarctic supply ship, the Aurora Australis....

By Nelson Renteria SAN SALVADOR, Aug 24 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Farmer Abelardo Ayala took a tough decision on his estate in San Juan Tepezontes, a traditional coffee-producing region of El Salvador: to swap his coffee trees for cocoa as a warming climate hit his crop. Ayala said his plantation - situated between 600 and 1,000 metres (1,969-3,281 feet) above sea level in the south-central department of La Paz - had been ideal for growing coffee....

The most buzzed-about new feature in the latest iPhone is Siri, the virtual minion. You can give her an amazing range of spoken commands, without any training or special syntax, and marvel as she does your bidding. You can say, “Call my assistant” or “Wake me up at eight” or “Make an appointment with Dr. Woodward for Friday at 2 p.m.” You can say, “How do I get to the airport from here?...

The government shutdown might only be a partial one, but not when it comes to federal climate efforts. Among the dozens of agencies and departments shuttered by the shutdown—now in its 14th day—are several shops that spearhead the government’s response to global warming, notably NASA, NOAA, the Agriculture Department and EPA. The impact, so far, has been irritating if not terribly consequential, said activists, analysts and former agency officials. Travel has been curtailed, for example, and research largely has been put on hold....

What lurks within the Red Planet? Although only a tenth as massive as Earth, Mars looks to have once been habitable like our own world, leading scientists to wonder whether such similarity cuts to the cores of both planets. In its innards, is Mars still a shrunken mirror of Earth, or is the interplanetary resemblance only crust-deep? Tantalizing hints have been gleaned from gravitational data provided by past missions. But now the interior of Mars has been revealed as never before, thanks to unprecedented measurements from NASA’s InSight lander....

Our knack for language helps us structure our thinking. Yet the ability to wax poetic about trinkets, tools or traits may not be necessary to think about them abstractly, as was once suspected. A growing body of evidence suggests nonhuman animals can group living and inanimate things based on less than obvious shared traits, raising questions about how creatures accomplish this task. In a study published last fall in the journal PeerJ, for example, Oakland University psychology researcher Jennifer Vonk investigated how well four orangutans and a western lowland gorilla from the Toronto Zoo could pair photographs of animals from the same biological groups....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Venoms are among nature’s fiercest adaptations. The geographer’s cone snail, for example, only injects about a tenth of a milligram of venom when it stings, and yet, this is more than enough to kill a person in under an hour. These chemical cocktails contain some of the most potent compounds known, and their fearsome power has awed people since the dawn of history. It wasn’t until modern advances in genetics, though, that scientists were able to study how the genes encoding for such potent toxins arise, providing glimpses into the workings of evolution at the molecular level....

NASA’s pioneering OSIRIS-REx probe has bagged up its precious asteroid sample for return to Earth. OSIRIS-REx has finished stowing the bits of the carbon-rich asteroid Bennu that it snagged last Tuesday (Oct. 20), successfully locking the material into the spacecraft’s return capsule, mission team members announced Thursday (Oct. 29). And the sample appears to be substantial—far heftier than the 2.1 ounces (60 grams) the mission had set as a target, team members said....

When news of the novel coronavirus’s Omicron variant first broke over the Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S., the sense of dread and fatigue was palpable. Just when the COVID pandemic’s outlook had started to improve, we were faced with a new arrival that was clearly more transmissible than previous variants—and likely able to significantly evade immunity conferred by vaccination or prior infection. But very preliminary data offered a shred of hope that Omicron may cause milder illness than previous variants....

Her finalist year: 1968 Her finalist project: Figuring out the algebraic properties of collections of objects What led to the project: Penelope Maddy always liked math, but she got particularly excited about the subject in her ninth grade algebra class at what is now Dana Middle School in San Diego. “It amazed me that you could take those little bits of information in a word problem, translate them into an equation or two, and find out the answer,” she says....

Acid rain may be causing lakes in eastern Canada to turn to ‘jelly’. The phenomenon is a result of the acid leaching calcium from clays, leading to a decline in some organisms that depend on it and a surge in the number of jelly-covered organisms replacing them. A team from Ontario, Canada discovered the strange phenomenon after analysing monthly surveys of Ontario’s lakes, which contained records of the local water chemistry over the past 30 years....

Editor’s note: On Nov. 10, 2015, this story was updated to correct the amount of plastic particles found per pound of salt. Diners in China who season their meals with sea salt may be unwittingly consuming microscopic pieces of plastic pollution. When researchers analyzed fifteen brands of common table salt bought at supermarkets across China, they found among the grains of seasoning micro-sized particles of the common water bottle plastic polyethylene terephthalate, as well as polyethylene, cellophane, and a wide variety of other plastics (Env....

In September, US president Joe Biden announced a plan to prepare for the next pandemic, with an initial outlay of $15 billion and a total investment of $65.3 billion over the next 10 years. The first goal is to “design, test, and approve a safe and effective vaccine against any pathogenic human virus within 100 days following the identification of an emergent viral pandemic.” A series of steps are laid out to accomplish this, the first being to characterize a so-called prototype pathogen from each of 26 viral families known to infect humans, to help identify potential epitopes that could inform vaccine design....

Late in the 19th century an unknown artist depicted a traveler who reaches the horizon, where the sky meets the ground. Kneeling in a stylized terrestrial landscape, he pokes his head through the firmament to experience the unknown [see illustration on page 89]. The image, known as the Flammarion engraving, illustrates the human quest for knowledge. Two possible interpretations of the visual metaphor correspond to two sharply different conceptions of knowledge....

SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES Ashish Kothari’s “A Tapestry of Alternatives” explores ways of living around the world that offer inspirations for sustainability. The article is hopeful and enlightening, but Kothari may wish to consider the value of self-defense. Inevitably, in the “tapestry of alternatives” that he describes, there will arise knots of powers with values at odds with these communities. They will, because they can, seek the goods of the commons. What’s to stop them?...

Oh, God.(Credit:BBC/YouTube Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)Even some of the more faithful might have wondered over the last few days whether there truly is a God.Famed physicist Stephen Hawking would like to help. Let’s imagine there isn’t, seems to be his preference.Indeed, in a speech at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., on Tuesday night, he made jokes about God’s supposed power and omnipresence.“What was God doing before the divine creation?...

As a kid in rural Connecticut in the early 2000s, Kathleen McWilliams was well acquainted with the danger of ticks. After days spent playing outside in the wooded areas around her house, “our home routine was you brushed your teeth, you went to the bathroom, and you did a tick check,” she said. So when, at age 15, McWilliams suddenly spiked a 104-degree fever, her mom immediately thought Lyme disease, the tick-borne illness caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi....