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New findings published Tuesday appear to undermine a controversial study - oft-cited by those who downplay the human impacts of climate change - that claimed variations in cloud cover are driving temperature changes across the globe. The analysis confirms - as most atmospheric scientists have long held - that the reverse is true: Clouds change in response to temperature changes. There is no evidence clouds can cause meaningful climate change, concluded the report’s author, Andrew Dessler, an atmospheric scientist at Texas A&M University....

When strolling alongside a busy city street on a smoggy summer day, it may seem as if riding in one of the taxis streaming by might provide a respite from the exhaust-choked air. Instead new research from London reveals that taxi rides take a toll on your lungs as well as your wallet. In fact, taxi cabins expose drivers and riders to more air pollution than any other form of transportation, according to the results of a survey by Surbjit Kaur and her colleagues at Imperial College London....

Quantum cryptography promises a future in which computers communicate with one another over ultrasecure links using the razzle-dazzle of quantum physics. But scaling up the breakthroughs in research labs to networks with a large number of nodes has proved difficult. Now an international team of researchers has built a scalable city-wide quantum network to share keys for encrypting messages. The network can grow in size without incurring an unreasonable escalation in the costs of expensive quantum hardware....

More than a century after the idea was first floated, physicists have finally figured out how to tie water in knots in the laboratory. The gnarly feat, described today in Nature Physics, paves the way for scientists to experimentally study twists and turns in a range of phenomena — ionized gases like that of the Sun’s outer atmosphere, superconductive materials, liquid crystals and quantum fields that describe elementary particles. Lord Kelvin proposed that atoms were knotted “vortex rings” — which are essentially like tornado bent into closed loops and knotted around themselves, as Daniel Lathrop and Barbara Brawn-Cinani write in an accompanying commentary....

Black people are about three times more likely than white people to be killed by a police officer. Outrage over this long-running and relentless situation boiled over in the summer of 2020, with people across the U.S. taking to the streets to protest the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many others. The demonstrations—which themselves were largely peaceful—have involved notable incidents of police violence toward protesters. These events have further amplified questions about officers’ use of force and one of the most popular strategies aimed at reducing it: de-escalation....

If Americans made changes to their diets and stopped wasting food, they could reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help conserve global natural resources, experts say. Cutting down on milk and meat protein are top ways to lower an individual’s carbon footprint, said Janet Ranganathan, vice president of science and research at the World Resources Institute. She is the lead author of a report published today that explores how dietary changes in the world’s wealthiest nations can affect the environment....

Belgian Blue cattle are hulking animals that provide unusually large amounts of prized, lean cuts of beef, the result of decades of selective breeding. Now, a team of scientists from South Korea and China says that it has created the porcine equivalent using a much faster method. These ‘double-muscled’ pigs are made by disrupting, or editing, a single gene—a change that is much less dramatic than those made in conventional genetic modification, in which genes from one species are transplanted into another....

No two subway systems have the same design. New York City’s haphazard rail system differs markedly from the highly organized Moscow Metro (above), or the tangled spaghetti of Tokyo’s subway network. Each system’s design is the result of many factors, including local geography, the city’s layout and traffic distribution, politics, culture and degree of urban planning. “There’s an endless list of possible parameters that can influence the shape of a subway network,” says Marc Barthelemy, a theoretical physicist at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission....

How Mercury Gets into Seafood Scientists have known how mercury from industrial pollution affects local freshwater ecosystems and poses a human health threat [see “Mapping Mercury”; SciAm, September 2005]. New data reveal just how the mercury cycle functions in the ocean. Based on samples from 16 sites from Hawaii to Alaska and on computer simulations, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey and other institutions conclude that bacterial decomposition of algae that have sunk from the surface to mid-depth plays a crucial role....

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, the Red Queen tells Alice that “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” This passage inspired the name of one of the principal concepts of evolution: in its broadest sense, the Red Queen hypothesis describes the evolutionary arms race between two species—say, predator and prey—who evolve side by side in response to each other, both vying for survival by adapting to the pressure of coexistence....

The ash cloud that rose from a volcano in Iceland last week to halt air traffic in the U.K. and much of the rest of Europe appears to be easing its stranglehold on transportation. EUROCONTROL, an intergovernmental air traffic control organization based in Brussels, announced Monday that its member states were designating a limited “no-fly zone” beyond which airlines would be permitted to operate by Tuesday morning. So how soon is such an air travel-impacting event to recur?...

Pouring a bucket of ice water over one’s head may seem like a distant summer memory. But although the “ice bucket challenge” craze has died down, public awareness of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, has never been stronger. The viral video campaign raised $115 million from more than 3 million donors for the ALS Association. In one month, from July 29 to August 29, donors raised $100....

In the age of social media, texting, mobile e-commerce and video streaming it’s easy to overlook an experience hasn’t gotten better for smartphone users: talking on the phone. Despite sophisticated smartphones and networks, many mobile users are not satisfied with call clarity. None of the 100-plus smartphones in Consumer Reports’ 2014 phone ratings earned better than a good score for voice quality. A large number of smartphones rated only as “fair....

Wind turbines function best in wide-open spaces where they can capture airflow unobstructed by buildings or mountains. Unfortunately, these same conditions are also optimal for aircraft takeoffs and landings, creating tension between wind energy utilities and airports in a number of locations worldwide. Utility-scale wind turbines, many of which stand more than 100 meters tall, can interfere with the radar used to safely guide aircraft. Radar works by emitting radio waves in a particular direction and gathering data about waves reflected back to the radar’s position that can be used to identify the range, altitude, direction and speed of nearby objects....

Of the 24 Fellows honored today with the MacArthur Foundation’s 2013 “genius” awards, about half labor on the frontlines of science and technology. One of those is Susan Murphy, a 55-year-old statistician at the University of Michigan. In this interview she talks about her passion for using math to improve health care for people with mental illness. She and the other recipients earn a $625,000 prize to be paid out over five years (an increase from the $500,000 given in past years....

As the aftershocks of the January 12 magnitude 7.0 earthquake outside of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, taper off and the dust settles, new needs are coming to light. The health of many of the three million residents said to have been shaken by the quake will be determined in the coming weeks as aid workers and others rush to treat the wounded, provide food and water, and try to prevent disease outbreaks....

What are ideas? —Celine Joiris, via e-mail Psychologist Richard J. Haier of the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine replies: WHEN AN IDEA pops into your head, it is unlikely the result of a single event—like the click of the proverbial lightbulb—in your brain. Studies have shown that no solitary brain area is an exclusive thinking center where ideas emerge. A musical inspiration may start in a different part of the brain than a mathematical concept or a notion about what to eat for dinner....

LONDON (Reuters) - British and Finnish scientists have found a way of generating renewable propane using a bacterium widely found in the human intestine and say the finding is a step to commercial production of a fuel that could one day be an alternative to fossil fuel reserves. “Although we have only produced tiny amounts so far, the fuel we have produced is ready to be used in an engine straight away,” said Patrik Jones of the department of life sciences at Imperial College London, who worked on the research....

Top international banks “are placing their bets” on a future contrary to the Paris climate agreement by financing billions of dollars worth of fossil fuel projects, environmental groups said in a report yesterday. Twenty-five major banks, such as Bank of America Corp., Barclays PLC, Citigroup Inc. and HSBC Holdings PLC, have invested $784 billion in coal mining, coal-fired electricity, so-called “extreme oil” operations and liquefied natural gas infrastructure between 2013-15, according to the study....

Dear EarthTalk: I caught the tail end of a discussion about “ecopsychology” recently on the radio, something about the negative impacts of people not communing with nature enough, spending too much time watching TV, sitting at computers, etc… Can you enlighten? – Bridget W., Seattle, WA The term ecopsychology, first coined by writer and theorist Theodore Roszak in his 1992 book, Voice of the Earth, is loosely defined as the connection between ecology and human psychology....