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GLASGOW, Scotland—The climate talks have shifted from global pronouncements to technical skirmishes as negotiators work behind the scenes to address dangers faced by millions of people from today’s rising temperatures. Ministers from almost 200 countries are trying to forge agreement on issues that were too contentious for rank-and-file negotiators to resolve last week. Many of those topics hinge on money. And the one quickly emerging as key to the success of this year’s Conference of the Parties, or COP, is financing for lives, livelihoods and communities that have been lost or damaged by climate change....

Last November, Facebook launched an advertising service called Beacon that shared information about users’ online activity—such as buying movie tickets online—with other Facebook members. The social networking Web site, however, neglected to ask its users if they wanted data about other sites they visited as well as the things they bought online automatically posted to their profile pages. Worse, that information went to users that the members had designated as friends....

By Bruce Wallace PARIS (Reuters) - Bill Gates grows most animated when the talk turns to the “cool” new energy technologies that have yet to leave the lab. Gates was a rare civilian sharing the limelight alongside presidents and prime ministers at the opening session of Paris climate talks on Monday. Offstage, in a barren conference room, he excitedly described the possibility of generating energy through the long-speculated process of artificial photosynthesis, using the energy of sunshine to produce liquid hydrocarbons that could challenge the supremacy of fossil fuels....

Human hands may have evolved their unique shape in order to better punch the living daylights out of competitors, a new study suggests. The new findings, published today (Dec. 19) in the Journal of Experimental Biology, show that the clenched fist produces no more force than an open-palm slap, but protects the fingers better. Human’s unique hand shape is one of only a few possible configurations that allow an organism to have both manual dexterity and the ability to brutally club opponents, the study reveals....

Editor’s note: We are posting this story from the April 2010 issue early. Late last year a series of sophisticated Internet attacks emanating from China burrowed deep into the computer systems of some two dozen U.S. corporations, among them Northrop Grumman, Dow Chemical and Yahoo. One fought back. After revealing that the attacks targeted not only its core intellectual property but the e-mail accounts of Chinese human-rights activists, Google announced that it would stop censoring search results on Google....

Meeting the Paris climate agreement’s targets could prevent thousands of heat-related deaths in cities across the United States, scientists say. The carbon-cutting pledges nations have already submitted to the Paris Agreement are consistent with global warming of about 3 degrees Celsius above the world’s preindustrial temperatures. The ultimate goal is to keep those temperatures within a 1.5 or 2 C threshold—meaning stronger pledges and faster action are needed. Now, new research suggests that meeting those targets will save lives....

Within one second of the big bang, the first newborn black holes may have announced their formation with gravitational waves that stretched and squeezed the fabric of existence as they rippled outward into the expanding universe. Now researchers at Northwestern University have begun planning a tabletop-size sensor that could detect these primordial howls for the first time. The gigantic $1-billion Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) first measured the spacetime ripples known as gravitational waves in 2016; these phenomena came from the collision and merging of distant supermassive black holes....

The brain presents a unique challenge for medical treatment: it is locked away behind an impenetrable layer of tightly packed cells. Although the blood-brain barrier prevents harmful chemicals and bacteria from reaching our control center, it also blocks roughly 95 percent of medicine delivered orally or intravenously. As a result, doctors who treat patients with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s, often have to inject drugs directly into the brain, an invasive approach that requires drilling into the skull....

If scientists are to ever perfect the science of cryopreserving organs, they will have to succeed not only at protecting them at frigid temperatures, but also at bringing them back from their deep freeze. With current warming methods, even small tissues tend to crack or crystallize as they are warmed, leaving them useless. On Wednesday, however, researchers announced they had devised a technology that could rewarm larger pieces of tissue without major damage, paving the way for future studies that could demonstrate whether the method could be used to one day store organs for transplants....

Italian scientists have devised an innovative and economically feasible biorefinery that can squeeze more chemicals out of the mountains of grape waste produced during wine production. Last year around 28 billion litres of wine were produced globally—enough to fill over eleven thousand Olympic sized swimming pools. But after pressing the last of the juice from the grape, a whole lot of skins and seeds are left—around 5 million tons of the stuff....

Several octopuses might have recently become the happiest individuals in their species’ history when researchers gave them MDMA—the party drug often called Molly or Ecstasy. This may sound like a contender for an “Ig Nobel Prize,” but the scientists behind the study, published in October in Current Biology, say tripping cephalopods can help us better understand the roots of sociability throughout the animal kingdom—including in people. “As human beings, we like to know where we came from,” says Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and co-author of the new paper....

For years, the automobile industry has argued that congressional attempts to make cars and trucks more fuel-efficient would compromise passenger safety. The argument is based on the premise that the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards imposed in 1975 resulted in a reduction of vehicle weights, which in turn caused about 2,000 traffic deaths a year that would not have occurred otherwise. But as Congress considers an energy bill that would further boost fuel economy—the combined average for cars and light trucks has been stalled at about 25 miles per gallon since the 1980s—transportation experts have disputed the contention that a lighter fleet would be less safe....

Did life ever exist on the moon? Maybe! Have scientists found evidence of life on the moon? Definitely not. Why are we talking about this? A new paper was published online today (July 23) in the journal Astrobiology with a thrilling headline: “Was There An Early Habitability Window for Earth’s Moon?” Its associated press release had an even more exciting title: “Researcher sees possibility of moon life.” Wowza! This is genuinely cool stuff....

More than 100,000 years ago, humans lived in the caves that dot South Africa’s coastline. With the sea on their doorstep and the Cape’s rich diversity of plant life at their backs, these anatomically modern Homo sapiens flourished. Over several millennia, they collected shells that they used as beads, created toolkits to manufacture red pigment, and sculpted tools from bones. Now some of these caves, along the country’s southern coast, have shed light on humanity’s earliest-known culinary experiments with carbohydrates, a staple in many modern diets....

The Canadian tar sands, or oil sands, are much more carbon-laden than most other fossil fuels produced in North America, and their possible outsized impact on the climate is one of the primary reasons the proposed Keystone XLPipeline, which would carry tar sands oil to Texas refineries, is so controversial. Despite long odds as oil prices continue their dip below $50 per barrel, commercial tar sands mining is coming for the first time to the U....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Marcus Feldman never planned to end up on the front lines of evolutionary biology. “I always wanted to do mathematics, as much as I could,” he said. “There was a little bit of time when I flirted with the idea of being a psychiatrist.” More than anything else, Feldman is a polymath. His desk at Stanford University, where he has been a professor for 46 years, is tiled with stacks upon stacks of journal articles, most teetering above coffee-cup height....

In December, residents in Marin, a county in the northern part of the San Francisco Bay Area nestled across from the Golden Gate Bridge, woke up to find that some of their roadways, docks and parking lots were underwater. Unlike in past years, when the king tides—unusually high tides that occur when the sun and moon are closer to the Earth—were accompanied by stormy weather, residents this year were faced with just some minor flooding....

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently granted an “emergency use authorization” of a blood test for antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. It is the first such test to receive approval for the U.S. market. And it comes at a time when health experts and leaders are embracing immunity as a potential end point to the pandemic. In Colorado, a company that makes a coronavirus antibody test has donated kits to the state’s San Miguel County so that everyone there can be tested if they want to....

In 1967, a graduate student named Jocelyn Bell discovered something strange emanating from a region of the sky known as the Summer Triangle: pulses of radio waves repeating every 1.3373 seconds over and over again like a clock ticking slightly-slowly. It’s not every day that you find a nearly perfect clock ticking at you from the sky, so Bell and her colleagues half-jokingly called the source of the signal “LGM1”—the “LGM” being short for “Little Green Men....

Before AI was hot, Henry Lieberman, a computer scientist, invited me to see his group’s work at MIT. Henry was obsessed with the idea that AI lacked common sense. So, together with his colleagues Catherine Havasi and Robyn Speer, he had been collecting commonsense statements in a Web site. Commonsense statements are facts that are obvious to humans but are hard to grasp for machines. They are things such as “water is wet” or “love is a feeling....