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Researchers say the analysis was intended to more precisely gauge the ecological consequences of climate change. Studies have already estimated that species such as butterflies are creeping toward the poles at a rate of six kilometers per decade as temperatures rise. Some species, however, may not be able to keep pace with future changes potentially leading to new regional ecosystems as novel climate patterns emerge, possibly leading to extinctions if some climates disappear entirely....

Four of the world’s 10 costliest natural disasters in 2018 occurred in the United States, accounting for nearly $53 billion in economic losses and 176 deaths, according to the global reinsurance firm Aon PLC. Each of those U.S. disasters—two Atlantic hurricanes and two California wildfires—were influenced by climate change, said the experts who prepared the 84-page “Weather, Climate & Catastrophe Insight” report released yesterday. “Weather events always occur, the question is are those events changing and what is the cause of that change?...

Breath is life. But pollution-laden air is “quietly poisoning us,” Gardiner writes in her arresting account of one of the biggest environmental threats to human health, one that claims seven million premature deaths a year worldwide. Through a world tour of air-pollution hotspots, Gardiner, a journalist, personalizes the damage pollutants do with vivid portraits of residents living alongside dirty ports in Los Angeles, women inhaling acrid smoke from cooking fires in rural India and the “sour taste” left in her mouth by London’s diesel-clogged air....

What started in 1989 as an e-mail list for a few dozen string theorists has now grown to a collection of more than two million papers—and the central hub for physicists, astronomers, computer scientists, mathematicians and other researchers. On January 3 the preprint server arXiv.org crossed the milestone with a numerical analysis paper entitled “Affine Iterations and Wrapping Effect: Various Approaches.” (The Library of Alexandria, for comparison, is believed to have contained no more than hundreds of thousands of manuscripts....

NASA has selected four concept studies that may lead to experiments that will be set up by Orion astronauts when they reach the lunar surface: Two concept studies proposed separately by researchers at the University of Maryland at College Park and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center are designed to determine the distance from Earth to the moon with submillimeter accuracy. A scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory plans a radio-telescope array on the far side of the moon to study elementary particle acceleration in supernovae, quasars and the solar corona....

Carbon dioxide is the primary greenhouse culprit in human-generated global warming, most scientists agree, but CO2 itself, and a handful of other substances, are now being promoted as good alternatives to commonly used refrigerants that threaten Earth’s atmosphere and climate. To understand this paradoxical turn of events, it helps to recall the 1980s, when the world’s governments banded together to fix the Antarctic ozone hole, a continent-size gap in the atmospheric layer that protects human beings, among other living things, from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation....

When real brains operate in the real world, it’s a two-way street. Electrical activity in the brain’s motor cortex speeds down the spinal cord to the part of the body to be moved; tactile sensations from the skin simultaneously zip through the spinal cord and into the brain’s somatosensory cortex. The two actions are virtually inseparable: absent the feel of a floor under your feet, it’s awfully difficult to walk properly, and lacking the tactile sensation of a coffee mug, your brain cannot sense how tightly your fingers should grasp it....

NANTES, France—Knock, knock. That’s not the start of a joke but the hard-luck history of Uranus. New research suggests that the giant planet may have suffered two massive impacts early in its history, which would account for its extreme, mysterious axial tilt. Uranus orbits nearly on its side; its axis of rotation is skewed by 98 degrees relative to an ordinary upright orientation, perpendicular to the orbital plane. Many planetary scientists have sought to explain the odd tilt by invoking a giant impact into Uranus billions of years ago....

This story is a supplement to the feature “So You Think You Can Dance?: PET Scans Reveal Your Brain’s Inner Choreography” which was printed in the July 2008 issue of Scientific American. To identify brain areas important to dance, the authors had amateur tango dancers lie flat inside a PET scanner. The device held their heads stationary, but they were able to listen to tango music through headphones and move their legs along an inclined surface (below)....

Although more than 40 cases of Zika virus have been carried to the U.S. by unwitting travelers, today officials in Dallas County, Texas, announced the country’s first case of local transmission in the ongoing outbreak. The patient acquired the virus through sexual transmission, the Dallas County Health and Human Services department said after receiving confirmation of the infection from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The newly infected individual had sex with a person who had acquired Zika virus while traveling outside of the U....

Key Concepts Physics Energy Potential energy Conservation of energy Introduction If you enjoy chain reactions and spectacular sights, this activity is for you! Can you imagine how weaving rather unspectacular tongue depressors (or popsicle sticks or craft sticks) could set off a chain reaction of sticks flying in the air? Try it out and see for yourself! Background Energy is never created; it always gets transferred from one kind to another....

“At this point there’s nothing that indicates we’ll see a repeat of that,” said Mike Halpert, acting director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center. That said, it is winter, and winter is, well, cold. It’s also the type of year when incursions of Arctic air are most likely to happen, though it’s unlikely last winter’s seemingly frigid temps will repeat itself. “I would never say anything is impossible, but I would certainly say unlikely,” Halpert said....

Researchers announced that they have constructed a memory circuit from molecules and nanometer-size wires that is as dense as what manufacturers expect to be building in 2020. The circuit, which stores 0s and 1s by switching clusters of molecules between two states, contains 160,000 bits jammed together at a density of 1011 bits per square centimeter. Conventional microchips are at least 10 times less dense. The prototype is not yet as stable or reliable as commercial computer memory, and building it would require manufacturers to learn to harness materials other than silicon, the workhorse of computing technology....

BERLIN—Forests at high-altitudes in the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau are at risk of dying off or retreating downslope as a result of climate change, threatening the region’s rich biodiversity, researchers warn. “This is in contrast to the situation in other mountains, such as the Alps” where most long-term ecological studies have been based, says Achim Bräuning, a climate scientist at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. A main conclusion coming out of Alpine research is that forest growth at high elevations—especially timberline species that thrive at the transitional zone between woodlands and alpine tundra—is primarily limited by temperature....

When deciding whether to climb a hill, we try to take into account both how high it rises and how steep the ascent will be. Chances are good, however, that our estimates of both these variables will be wrong. Two recent studies show how our perception of vertical distances is skewed—perhaps for good evolutionary reasons. With a Little Help The walk to and from school can’t be uphill both ways, but going it alone might make it seem that way....

A multinational, robotic air corps is quietly invading the polar regions of the earth. Some catapult from ships; some launch from running pickup trucks; and some take off the old-fashioned way, from icy airstrips. The aircraft range from remote-controlled propeller planes—of the type found at Toys “R” Us—to sophisticated, high-altitude jets. All are specially outfitted, not with weapons but with scientific instruments. Unmanned aircraft have made headlines in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the technology has quickly trickled down to scientists seeking a less expensive, safer way to study the earth’s poles....

By Lovasoa Rabary NAIROBI, Jan 28 (Reuters) - Madagascar’s government appealed for international aid on Wednesday after a tropical storm earlier this month devastated large swathes of the Indian Ocean island, causing damage worth around $40 million. Sixty-eight people were killed and 130,000 displaced when the tropical storm Chedza hit Madagascar on Jan. 16, the National Bureau of Risk Management and Disaster said. The storm also lashed Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe in one of the worst disasters to hit the region in years....

Three researchers in so-called broken symmetry, which helps to explain the intricate workings of the smallest constituents of the universe, were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics today. Half the prize went to Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago, with the other half shared by Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University....

Nearly 40 percent of Americans are part of categories called the “alarmed” or “concerned,” meaning they are more likely to say global warming is man-made and are motivated to do something about it. At the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, there are the “doubtful” and “dismissive,” – the 25 percent of Americans who are more likely to express climate skepticism or doubt that climate change will ever harm them personally....

A fundamental property of the rarest element on Earth, astatine, has been discovered for the first time, scientists say. Astatine occurs naturally; however, scientists estimate much less than an ounce in total exists worldwide. For a long time, the characteristics of this elusive element were a mystery, but physicists at the CERN physics laboratory in Switzerland have now measured its ionization potential — the amount of energy needed to remove one electron from an atom of astatine, turning it into an ion or a charged particle....