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DAKAR (Reuters) - The death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak on record has reached nearly 7,000 in West Africa, the World Health Organization said on Saturday. The toll of 6,928 dead showed a leap of just over 1,200 since the WHO released its previous report on Wednesday. The U.N. health agency did not provide any explanation for the abrupt increase, but the figures, published on its website, appeared to include previously unreported deaths....

For centuries, Mediterranean countries have found countless ways to disagree – over religion, ethnicity, colonialism and trade. But there are signs the region might yet unite in pursuit of a common goal: renewable energy. European government and industry have been eyeing tracts of sun-drenched, vacant land in North Africa and the Middle East for some time. And now, officials and business executives are beginning to sweat out the details that could see renewable power sprouting in the desert....

Flies sleep, despite what that buzzing in your ear might tell you. But sleep’s purpose for flies–and why animals ranging from invertebrates to mammals such as humans do it–remains a mystery, particularly because simple rest alone seems to deliver similar restorative benefits to tired muscles. Recent studies have hinted that sleep might play a role in memory formation, and new research on fruit flies confirms this purpose and reveals some of the genetic mechanisms behind it....

By Declan Butler of Nature magazineEven as the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station continue to leak radiation, researchers have begun laying the groundwork for studies that will look for any long-term effects on public health.Academic scientists face major obstacles as they try to collate baseline data on radiation doses in the face of the enormous disruption caused by the earthquake and tsunami that hit the country last month....

By Misha Hussain MELIANDOU, Guinea (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A charred kapok tree and around a dozen graves scattered amongst the mud brick houses of Meliandou are painful reminders of the toll Ebola has taken on this village in southeast Guinea. Scientists traced the source of the worst-ever outbreak of Ebola to two-year-old Emile Ouamouno, who they believe contracted the disease while playing near the tree, home to hundreds of bats that may have been hosting the deadly virus....

A massive cloud of space junk—containing more than 23,000 pieces larger than 10 centimeters across—is currently zooming around Earth with an average speed of about 36,000 kilometers per hour. And as companies such as SpaceX and OneWeb plan to launch tens of thousands of new satellites over the next few years, this hazardous clutter will likely pose an increasing threat to space missions and astronauts. One possible solution may be an electrodynamic tether, a device that could help prevent future satellites from becoming abandoned wrecks....

LONDON – Critics of renewables have always claimed that sun and wind are only intermittent producers of electricity and need fossil fuel plants as back-up to make them viable. But German engineers have proved this is not so. By skillfully combining the output of a number of solar, wind and biogas plants the grid can be provided with stable energy 24 hours a day without fear of blackouts, according to the Fraunhofer Institute for Wind Energy and Energy System Technology (IWES) in Kassel....

Last year the United Nations set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty worldwide by 2030. That’s an audacious target. One of the first steps—figuring out where the most impoverished people live—has proved surprisingly difficult. Conducting economic surveys in poor or conflict-prone countries can be expensive and dangerous. Researchers have tried to work around this limitation by searching nighttime satellite images for unusually dark areas. “Places lit up at night are generally better off,” explains Marshall Burke, an assistant professor of earth science systems at Stanford University....

To see the big obstacle confronting renewable energy, look at Denmark. The small nation has some of the world’s largest wind farms. Yet because consumer demand for electricity is often lowest when the winds blow hardest, Denmark has to sell its overflow of electrons to neighboring countries for pennies—only to buy energy back when demand rises, at much higher prices. As a result, Danish consumers pay some of the highest electricity rates on the planet....

With all of the New Year’s diet ads claiming you can lose dozens of pounds in seemingly as many days, you probably are not alone if you looked in the mirror this morning and saw a less than ideal body. Or maybe you just picked up a new magazine in which already thin models have their remaining flesh scavenged by Photoshop to make them appear even slimmer. With all of these unrealistic promises and images, it can be hard to gain an accurate sense of one’s own body....

Previous analyses showed high concentrations of arsenic in the hair samples of mummies from both highland and coastal cultures in the region. However, researchers weren’t able to determine whether the people had ingested arsenic or if the toxic element in the soil had diffused into the mummies’ hair after they were buried. In the new study, scientists used a range of high-tech methods to analyze hair samples from a 1,000- to 1,500-year-old mummy from the Tarapacá Valley in Chile’s Atacama Desert....

To survive physically or psychologically, we sometimes need to react automatically to a speeding taxi as we step off the curb or to the subtle facial cues of an angry boss. That automatic mode of thinking, not under voluntary control, contrasts with the need to slow down and deliberately fiddle with pencil and paper when working through an algebra problem. These two systems that the brain uses to process information are the focus of Nobelist Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC....

Agriculture has fueled the eruption of human civilization. Efficiently raised, affordable crops and livestock feed our growing population, and hunger has largely been banished from the developed world as a result. Yet there are reasons to believe that we are beginning to lose control of our great agricultural machine. The security of our food supply is at risk in ways more noxious than anyone had feared. The trouble starts with crops....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineWhen US presidential science adviser John Holdren hosted a dinner and meetings between US and Chinese science officials in May, he must have known it would lead to a high-level stand-off. That came to pass on 11 October, when the Govern­ment Accountability Office (GAO), an arm of Congress, concluded in a report that those activities violated legislation banning scientific cooperation with China by NASA and by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which Holdren directs....

In the market for more brain power? In what’s being touted as “a landmark” result, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (U.M.) researchers report that a specific memory exercise may improve so-called fluid intelligence—the capacity to succeed at new cognitive tasks and in new situations. The finding flies in the face of conventional wisdom in psychology that training for one brain task cannot be transferred to improvement in other mental abilities....

Editor’s Note: This slideshow is a supplement to the Feature “The Chaotic Genesis of Planets” from the May 2008 issue of Scientific American. Barely a decade ago scientists who study how planets form had to base their theory on a single example—our solar system. Now they have dozens of mature systems and dozens more in birth throes. No two are alike. The basic idea behind the leading theory of planetary formation—tiny grains stick together and swoop up gas—conceals many levels of intricacy....

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the Spanish Nobel-winning biologist who mapped the neural anatomy of insects in the decades before World War I, likened the minute circuitry of their vision-processing neurons to an exquisite pocket watch. He likened that of mammals, by comparison, to a hollow-chested grandfather clock. Indeed, it is humbling to think that a honeybee, with its milligram-size brain, can perform tasks such as navigating mazes and landscapes on a par with mammals....

When the Nobel Foundation awarded Ray Davis and Masatoshi Koshiba the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics, it could have chosen to emphasize any of their many accomplishments. Davis made his name detecting neutrinos from the sun—the first of these notoriously elusive particles ever seen from beyond our planet—and Koshiba discovered them coming from the great supernova explosion of 1987. Their work was an experimental tour de force and helped to establish that neutrinos, which theorists had assumed were massless, in fact have a small mass....

By Lawrence Hurley and Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON, June 9 (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday rejected an early challenge by industry groups and states to the Obama administration’s proposal to curb carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants, saying the legal action was premature. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the various lawsuits objecting to the plan were filed too soon because the regulation has not yet been finalized....

More species protected by the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) have recovered during President Barack Obama’s administration than under all other presidents combined, the US Department of Interior announced on August 11. And 2016 marks a record high for species recovery, with six so far officially ‘delisted’ from ESA’s roster. The ESA, passed in 1973 to assist the recovery and protection of imperilled species and ecosystems, is widely seen as a landmark piece of environmental legislation....