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By Alister Doyle OSLO, August 25 (Reuters) - Small island states facing a “frightening” rise in sea levels will seek investments in everything from solar energy to fisheries to boost their economies at a U.N. summit next week. Leaders will meet in Samoa in the Pacific from Sept. 1-4 to drum up partnerships with companies, development banks and donors on projects that bring in dollars and jobs while protecting oceans and environments, organizers said....

John Castellani, a researcher in the Thermal & Mountain Medicine Division of the U.S. Army’s Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, takes on this question. Body weight changes usually result from long-term changes in lean or fat body mass, but they can also result from acute changes in total body water. Significant changes in body weight due to climate usually take the form of weight gained rather than weight lost, especially once the body has become acclimated to high levels of activity in the heat....

From Nature magazine Of the top ten leading causes of death in the United States, Alzheimer’s disease–which ranks sixth–is particularly devastating in that there is no cure, no way to prevent it and no proven way to slow its progression. And with at least 11 million Americans expected to have the disease by the middle of the century–boosting the annual costs of health care to more than $1 trillion–the U.S. government is anxiously looking to researchers to improve the prognosis....

Optogenetics is revolutionizing neuroscience. The technique involves genetically altering particular cell types to make them produce light-sensitive proteins; scientists can then activate the cells using light pulses delivered to the brain via fiber-optic cable. This has already given researchers an unparalleled ability to probe the circuitry underlying animal brain functions. But some have moved beyond the brain, working toward human medical applications. Treating blindness Credit: Brown Bird Design Optogenetics offers a flexible approach to treating, and possibly curing, blindness....

More than half of the roughly 24,000 megawatts of electricity generation capacity added to the U.S. grid in 2016 came from renewable resources, according to new findings from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency estimates that 60 percent of all utility-scale generation capacity additions for the year were from wind and solar resources, while roughly 3 percent came from hydropower, biomass, landfill gas and other sources. Among fossil fuels, natural gas accounted for the largest share of new electricity capacity in 2016, with an estimated 7,700 MW of new gas-fired power coming online (32 percent of all new capacity), while nuclear capacity grew by 1,347 MW (5....

The world’s first kidney transplant from a living HIV-positive donor to another HIV-positive person was successfully performed Monday by doctors at a Johns Hopkins University hospital. By not having to rely solely on organs from the deceased, doctors may now have a larger number of kidneys available for transplant. Access to HIV-positive organs became possible in 2013, and surgeries have been limited to kidneys and livers. “It’s important to people who aren’t HIV-positive because every time somebody else gets a transplant and gets an organ and gets off the list, your chances get just a little bit better,” said Dr....

Deep in the eastern Himalayas, where two continental plates and four countries converge, a treasure trove of new species has kept scientists on the lookout for the past decade. A recent report, assembled by the World Wildlife Fund International (WWF) based in Washington, D.C., gathered the fruits of these labors—completed by various organizations—and lists the 353 new plant and animal species that years of rugged research have now brought to the wider world’s attention....

The April issue of Scientific American includes an exclusive excerpt from Bill McKibben’s new book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, plus an interview that challenges his assumptions. Expanded answers to key interview questions, and additional queries and replies, appear here. McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont and is a co-founder of the climate action group, 350.org. He argues that humankind, because of its actions, now lives on a fundamentally different world, which he calls Eaarth....

Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has long relied on technology to help him connect with the outside world despite the degenerative motor neuron disease he has battled for the past 50 years. Whereas Hawking’s condition has deteriorated over time, a highly respected computer scientist indicated at last week’s International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that he and his team may be close to a breakthrough that could boost the rate at which the physicist communicates, which has fallen to a mere one word per minute in recent years....

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—NASA’s Kennedy Space Center here has been relatively quiet since the space shuttles retired three years ago. But now the site is bustling with media, top NASA officials are traveling to Florida, and engineers are busy readying the launchpad to blast off a brand-new spaceship. The cone-shaped Orion capsule is NASA’s next venture in human spaceflight, and it will eventually carry people to an asteroid or maybe Mars—if the U....

A high-altitude cloud that appeared above Titan two years ago is causing planetary scientists to rethink Saturn’s most intriguing moon. Research now shows that the cloud is made of hydrogen cyanide ice, whose very existence, 300 kilometres above Titan’s surface, suggests that the air above its south pole is a lot colder than anyone had suspected. “This is telling us that you have to expect the unexpected, even on ‘planets’ that we thought we knew relatively well,” says Remco de Kok, a planetary scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who led the study....

European scientists have synthesised uranium complexes that take them a step closer to producing commodity chemicals from carbon dioxide. Widespread fossil fuel depletion and concerns over levels of climatic carbon dioxide are motivating research to convert this small molecule into value-added chemicals. Organometallic uranium complexes have successfully activated various small molecules before. However, there were no reports of an actinide metal complex that could reductively couple with carbon dioxide to give a segment made from two carbon dioxide molecules – an oxalate dianion....

A newly discovered bipedal dinosaur represents the first indication not only of the presence of dinosaurs in the Wyoming region during the middle Jurassic period, but of ones partial to water. Evidence for the swimming dinosaur–a new species that remains unnamed–comes from its footprints, which have been preserved in a Wyoming rock formation dating to about 165 million years ago. At that time, a warm and relatively shallow body of water called the Sundance Sea covered a large part of the western U....

By Charlie DunmoreBRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union is on course to approve cultivation of a new type of genetically modified maize for the first time in more than a decade, according to a draft proposal from the bloc’s executive seen by Reuters.The proposal was drawn up after Europe’s second highest court last month blamed the European Commission for lengthy delays in the approval process for the insect-resistant maize, developed jointly by DuPont and Dow Chemical....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineTinkering with male mosquitoes so that they cannot produce sperm is a promising way to control the spread of the malaria-carrying insects in the wild.Researchers had been concerned that female Anopheles gambiaemosquitoes might not be fooled into mating with the spermless males, but lab tests show that they are just as attracted to sterile males as to normal ones1.Releasing such males into the wild offers a way to control malaria that does not rely on insecticides, which many species are increasingly developing resistance to....

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - The science of gene therapy is finally delivering on its potential, and drugmakers are now hoping to produce commercially viable medicines after tiny sales for the first two such treatments in Europe. Thanks to advances in delivering genes to targeted cells, more treatments based on fixing faulty DNA in patients are coming soon, including the first ones in the United States. Yet the lack of sales for the two drugs already launched to treat ultra-rare diseases in Europe highlights the hurdles ahead for drugmakers in marketing new, extremely expensive products for genetic diseases....

Outnumbering our human cells by about 10 to one, the many minuscule microbes that live in and on our bodies are a big part of crucial everyday functions. The lion’s share live in the intestinal tract, where they help to fend off bad bacteria and aid in digestion. But as scientists determine what microbes are actually present and what they are doing, they are discovering that the bugs play an even larger role in human health than previously suspected—and perhaps at times exerting more influence than genes themselves....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration’s second attempt at writing regulations for hydraulic fracturing on public lands is not intended to appease either environmentalists or oil and gas drillers, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said on Tuesday. Jewell told lawmakers at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing that the department was “very close” to unveiling the rules and reiterated a recent comment that the rules would be out in “weeks, not months....

Kodari is a ghost town on an empty Nepalese highway that cuts through some of the steepest slopes of the Himalayas. One year after the magnitude-7.8 Gorkha earthquake killed nearly 9,000 people, the once-buzzing trade centre looks like a battlefield where armies of giants once waged war. The road is littered with rusting cars and trucks smashed into bizarre shapes. Massive boulders rest on the wreckage of homes. “It’s a good example of building a town in the wrong place,” says Kristen Cook, a geologist at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in Potsdam, as she climbs over the rubble from one of the landslides that crushed the town....

When giant waves —sometimes 30 meters tall, many times the height of the surrounding crests—suddenly rear up out of the ocean, they pose severe threats to even the largest craft. Unlike tsunamis, which may follow a large undersea earthquake, these so-called rogue waves have no known definitive origin. Nor can they be predicted. Understanding how they form is key to forecasting where and when they might arise. A group of mathematicians—Eric Vanden-Eijnden of New York University, Giovanni Dematteis and Miguel Onorato, both at the University of Turin in Italy, and Tobias Grafke of the University of Warwick in England—has now demonstrated a new way to predict rogue waves in experiments using a massive water tank....