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The Supreme Court today denied an industry request to reconsider a lower court ruling against a Bush administration rule on mercury emissions from power plants. The court announced today that it would not review a decision by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, requested by the Utility Air Regulatory Group, to overturn the Clean Air Mercury Rule. The utility group asked the court to review the case last fall, arguing that the Bush administration had legally decided not to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act’s Section 112, which requires the strictest emission controls, in order to allow for a more flexible cap-and-trade approach favored by utilities....

Although the environmental benefits of burning less fossil fuel by using renewable sources of energy—such as geothermal, hydropower, solar and wind—are clear, there’s been a serious roadblock in their adoption: cost per kilowatt-hour. That barrier may be opening, however—at least for one of these sources. Two recent reports, among others, suggest that geothermal may actually be cheaper than every other source, including coal. Geothermal power plants work by pumping hot water from deep beneath Earth’s surface, which can either be used to turn steam turbines directly or to heat a second, more volatile liquid such as isobutane (which then turns a steam turbine)....

By Toni Clarke WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration will hold a public meeting this summer to address drug company concern that restrictions on what they can say about off-label use of drugs violate their First Amendment right to free speech. The meeting, announced last month by FDA chief counsel Elizabeth Dickinson, comes as a bill known as 21st Century Cures, designed to speed new drugs to market, is moving through Congress....

By Gayathri VaidyanathanMore than a century of groundwater over-exploitation in Vietnam has drawn the water table down and, with it, arsenic. It may only be a matter of time before the toxic element also permeates deep aquifers in other Asian countries that follow the same practice, such as those around the Bengal Basin.These conclusions, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, point to high future costs in terms of both health and water-purification processes....

Editor’s note: In light of the recent death of Martin Gardner, we are republishing this column from the March 2002 issue of Scientific American. In 1950 Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled “The Hermit Scientist,” about what we would today call pseudoscientists. It was Gardner’s first publication of a skeptical nature (he was the math games columnist for Scientific American for more than a quarter of a century)....

Climbers struggling the last few steps to the peak of Makalu in the Himalayas have long marveled at the sight of bar-headed geese flying high above to their winter refuge in India. The birds cruise at an altitude of 29,500 feet, nearly as high as commercial aircraft. For years scientists believed that strong tailwinds and updrafts aided the geese on their journey. A team of researchers led by Charles Bishop of Bangor University in North Wales tested this theory by tracking more than a dozen bar-headed geese harnessed with small backpacks containing satellite transmitters that established their location, speed and altitude....

I loved magic shows when I was a kid. I remember being absolutely fascinated by mysterious events and the possibility that some of us might possess supernatural powers such as the ability to read minds, get a glimpse of the future, or, perhaps, suddenly port into another dimension. The human mind is a curious one. Although it is well-known that children have a lively imagination, what about adults? You might be surprised to learn that a recent national poll found that over 71% of Americans believe in “miracles”, 42% of Americans believe that “ghosts” exist, 41% think that “extrasensory perception” (e....

About one third of the world’s protected land faces intense pressure from human-related factors such as buildings, agriculture, roads and nighttime lighting, a new study from the Wildlife Conservation Society and the universities of Queensland in Australia and British Columbia in Canada shows. Intense human pressure is linked to the decline of biodiversity, the feature that protected areas are meant to preserve. The 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity, signed by 168 countries, has mandated 17 percent of land be contained in “effectively and equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected” protected areas by 2020....

“What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?” —Toni Morrison Song of Solomon Halloween celebrates illusion. Even if we manage to ignore flights of fancy the other 364 days of the year, come October 31 we set out to enjoy trickery and pretense. We disguise ourselves, we carve malevolent expressions in bland, innocuous pumpkins and we do our best to suspend our disbelief as we enter supposedly haunted houses....

Humans are willful creatures. No other species on the planet has gained so much mastery over its own fate. We have neutralized countless threats that once killed us in the millions: we have learned to protect ourselves from the elements and predators in the wild; we have developed cures and treatments for many deadly diseases; we have transformed the small gardens of our agrarian ancestors into the vast fields of industrial agriculture; and we have dramatically increased our chances of bearing healthy children despite all the usual difficulties....

Cannabis rots your brain — or does it? Last year, a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggested that people who used cannabis heavily as teenagers saw their IQs fall by middle age. But a study published today — also in PNAS — says that factors unrelated to cannabis use are to blame for the effect. Nature explores the competing claims. What other factors might cause the decline in IQ?...

A glitch with a Russian spacecraft has helped clear the way for a private capsule’s first contracted cargo flight to the International Space Station early next month, NASA officials say. Russia’s Soyuz TMA-06M spacecraft was originally set to launch three astronauts toward the station on Oct. 15. But the Soyuz’s liftoff will be delayed by about a week while technicians install a replacement part to fix a technical issue, Russian space officials announced Sunday (Sept....

Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on security and privacy during the age of drone warfare. Part two is available here. The year is 2020. Two Air Force officers sit in a darkened control center at an Air Force base in Nevada, carefully watching a bank of computer screens. One of the officers gently pushes a joystick to the right, and half a world away a swarm of a dozen small drones, none weighing more than a few hundred grams, banks to the right and continues to skim almost silently across the ground at about 65 kilometers per hour toward a small settlement that has been identified as a source of possible terrorist activity....

Sally Ride was America’s sweetheart—a famous and revered hero for being the first U.S. woman in space. And yet in many ways we barely knew her. That will change for readers of Lynn Sherr’s new biography, Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space (Simon & Schuster, June 2014). Sherr became a good friend of Ride’s over many years reporting on the space shuttle program for ABC News, including both of Ride’s space shuttle flights in the 1980s and her role investigating the Challenger and Columbia shuttle accidents....

LE BOURGET, France—The United States and China appear joined at the hip during U.N. global warming negotiations here, at least on the surface. President Obama’s first official climate meeting yesterday was with Chinese President Xi Jinping. The leaders of the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas-emitting nations touted two previous joint emissions deals, gave nearly back-to-back speeches on the urgency of tackling the climate threat and together issued a statement of support for an ambitious global accord....

By Brendan BorrellScientists have viewed the expression of an individual gene inside a human cell. Knowledge of the real-time dynamics of gene expression may help researchers to explain variation among genetically identical cells and the molecular processes that lead to cancer.Traditionally, biochemists and cell biologists examined the time-averaged behavior of thousands or millions of cells in order to understand how the information contained in genes is used to make proteins. Then, in the late 1990s, researchers developed a technique to tag genes so that they produce a fluorescent signal the moment they are transcribed into protein blueprints known as messenger RNA....

Mobile applications for smartphones, tablets and other gadgets can turn just about anyone into a citizen scientist. App-equipped wireless devices give users worldwide the ability to act as remote sensors for all sorts of data as they go through their daily routines—whether it’s invasive garlic mustard weed in Washington State or red-bordered stinkbugs in Quintana Roo, Mexico. Smartphones can automate data collection and incorporate many important data-gathering functions—such as capturing images, audio and text—into a single tool that can “stamp” the date, time and geographic coordinates associated with an observation, says Alex Mayer, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Michigan Technological University....

“If by some special arrangement humans could be made to breathe water instead of air, serious obstacles to attempts to penetrate deeper into the ocean and to travel in outer space might be overcome. Suppose we prepare an isotonic solution that is like blood plasma in salt composition and charge this solution with oxygen under greater than normal pressure. Can a mammal breathe such a solution? I performed the first experiments, with mice as the experimental animals, at the University of Leiden in 1961....

(Credit: Screenshot by Nick Statt / CNET) When the smartphone phenomenon Flappy Bird took off not so long ago – and before it morphed into something uncontrollable and became its own hard-to-swallow lesson for the game industry – it was as if everyone you’d ever known had suddenly stumbled on mobile gaming’s most brilliantly manufactured drug. Facebook and Instragram were awash in high score screenshots and admissions of addiction-fueled guilt while all of Twitter might as well have been Flappy Bird references with some news and global chatter sandwiched in between....

Identifying black holes isn’t a matter of simply finding an empty spot in space. These massive objects can famously swallow everything—even light—that could proffer obvious signs of their presence. Scientists seeking them out must rely on more circumstantial evidence, which comes from the fact black holes are messy eaters: As material funnels into one, it piles up into a spinning disk of glowing debris that can spit out x-rays and enormous jets of subatomic particles....