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Late one night in 2010 after the annual Google Zeitgeist conference had wrapped up, psychologist Martin Seligman, a featured speaker that year, found himself in a huddle with some of the biggest names in technology. Google had just broken ground using search-engine queries to monitor the spread of influenza in the U.S., and Google Maps was taking the world by storm. The potential applications for such tools seemed limitless, so Seligman, a founding father of positive psychology, and Google co-founder Larry Page, among others, began to explore the possibilities....

By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - Countries’ current pledges for greenhouse gas cuts will fail to achieve a peak in energy-related emissions by 2030 and likely result in a temperature rise of 2.6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the International Energy Agency said on Monday. An international deal to combat climate change is meant to be agreed in December but a meeting in Bonn, Germany, last week ended with little progress toward an agreement to keep average temperature rises within 2C....

In 2006, the scientists who monitor methane, a greenhouse gas about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide, thought that concentrations of the gas, which had sharply risen in the 1980s, had plateaued. “If you look at the entire record from the beginning to 2006, it looks like a chemical system that is approaching steady state,” said Edward Dlugokencky, an atmospheric chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory who monitors global methane emissions....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

For more than 150 years scientists have primarily relied on fossilized bones and teeth to reconstruct creatures from deep time. Skeletons divulge the sizes and shapes of long-ago animals; muscle markings on bones indicate how brawny the creatures were and how they may have moved; tooth shape and wear attest to the kinds of food eaten. All in all, researchers have managed to extract extraordinary quantities of information from these hard parts....

As the heat wave in East Asia drags on, hospitalizing thousands in Japan and straining power resources in South Korea, a new study by European climate researchers predicts that today’s unusually high temperatures may become tomorrow’s normal summer weather for many regions across the globe. Published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the paper projects that heat waves will become far more common by 2040, even if humans manage to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions before then....

Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. Bronicki replied to the survey in a phone interview; what follows is an edited and condensed transcript of that conversation. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of geothermal energy? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term?...

California can hit its goal of going carbon neutral by 2045 if it pulls emissions out of the air and slashes greenhouse gases from farming, landfills and other sources, according to a federal study released yesterday. The nation’s most populous state needs to remove 125 million tons of carbon emissions per year from the atmosphere, roughly equivalent of removing 26 million cars from its roads annually, said an analysis by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory....

The apocalypse is nigh—or it certainly seems that way. We live besieged by deadly viruses, terrorist threats and dunderheaded politicians. And because it is Halloween this week, we need to worry about zombies. Flesh-eating hordes of the walking dead, ever-growing, ever hungry, chasing us down alleys and forcing us to hide in dark basements. Not, however, if chemist Raychelle Burks can help us with her “death cologne” camouflage method. Burks is a postdoctoral research fellow at Doane College in Nebraska and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where she studies new materials for sensors....

Editor’s Note (5/13/21): After this story was published, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines stating that fully vaccinated people do not need to wear masks in most indoor settings, apart from certain places, such as hospitals, nursing homes, jails and public transportation. The agency also updated earlier guidance on outdoor masking, saying vaccinated individuals do not need to wear masks when they are outside, regardless of crowd size....

Big Sur is wild. It’s Kerouac country, where California Highway 1 curves over steep bluffs along the Golden State’s central coast, showing off the blue marble Pacific Ocean. Pristine, frothy waves crash below into bouldered coves and unspoiled white beaches. Travel 50 kilometers north and you will arrive in what by comparison is the urban sprawl of the Monterey Peninsula. Once described by John Steinbeck as “a poem, a stink, a grating noise,” the former industrial fishing city of Monterey, now mostly a tourist town, spills into the ocean....

Nearly one-third of physical scientists from sexual and gender minorities in the United Kingdom have considered leaving their jobs because of their workplace climate, suggests a survey. And 18% who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or from other sexual and gender minorities (LGBT+) said they had experienced harassment, bullying or exclusionary behaviour in the workplace. That figure rises to 32% for transgender people and those who don’t identify as either male or female (non-binary)....

The nation’s ongoing fungal meningitis outbreak has killed 30 and sickened 419 people so far, but the fungus responsible has never wrought such havoc before. The fungus, Exserohilum rostratum, is a plant-eating generalist equipped with a spore-launching mechanism ideal for going airborne, is not an especially picky eater and, although it prefers grasses, will dine on many items—including humans. But just how a pathogen typically associated with the great outdoors got into the three lots of injectable steroids prepared inside an admittedly filthy laboratory—and why only three lots—remains a puzzling mystery....

By Marian Turner of Nature magazineGermany aims to shorten the time it takes for information on infectious-disease outbreaks to reach federal authorities from up to 18 days to just three, after this year’s outbreak of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli killed 53 people. But the medical community is calling for more action–from more comprehensive disease diagnostics to funding for specialist physician training.The outbreak, which started in May this year, infected more than 3,500 people in Germany, 855 of whom developed the rare, life-threatening complication hemolytic uremic syndrome....

U.S. Researchers modeled noise levels in nearly 500 wilderness and park locations and found that more than half of them were twice as loud as the environment would be without human-generated sounds. This cacophony could inhibit animals’ hunting, mating and other survival behaviors. CHINA Some caterpillar pests have grown resistant to genetically modified (GM) crops designed to be toxic to them. But researchers have developed a hybrid of GM and nonmodified cotton that keeps one species of caterpillar susceptible to the plant’s deadly proteins....

Right off the bat, Sidney Harris makes it clear that he’s not a scientist. He’s a cartoonist who grew up in Brooklyn and drew for Playboy but also happens to know about neutrinos and the beginning of the universe. “I get the gist of it,” Harris says. “Neutrinos come from outer space. They go through everything, there’s a billion of them going through my hand right now…. Maybe?” He laughs, “I don’t know....

From the introduction of This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (Information Society Series), by Whitney Phillips. Reprinted by arrangement with MIT Press. Copyright © MIT Press, 2015. I first encountered trolling in the summer of 2007, after my then eighteen-year-old brother recommended I spend some time on 4chan’s /b/ board, one of the Internet ’ s most infamous and active trolling hotspots....

For several years now the popular media has run headlines about “a war on science.” Reporters note that federal funding for research is down, campaigns to undermine climate science attract hundreds of millions of dollars and politicians routinely reject findings that are uniformly accepted by scientists. But a panel of scholars last weekend argued for the most part against calling these aversive movements a war, with two historians even scolding scientists who embrace the idea as out of touch with public concerns....

By Sandra Chereb CARSON CITY Nevada (Reuters) - Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval signed a package of bills on Thursday to provide $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives for Tesla Motors, putting a bow on the deal for the electric car company to build a massive factory in the state. Sandoval said the agreement has “changed the trajectory of our state forever” during the signing ceremony late on Thursday, shortly after the four bills were unanimously passed by both legislative chambers....

SALT LAKE CITY — When black holes collide, do they hide in the dark or emit flashes of light? That question is up the air after an Earth-based detector spotted gravitational waves, or ripples in the fabric of space-time, created by two black holes merging together. Previous work suggested that for black holes of this size — about 30 times the mass of the sun — there would be no bright flash, no hazy glow, no light to speak of....