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LONDON (Reuters) - It has shrouded England’s most famous monuments for days, prompted a rash of calls to the emergency services over health fears and even stopped Prime Minister David Cameron from taking his early morning jog. A freak combination of weather conditions has left parts of the country covered in a smog haze made up of high levels of particles, including dust from the Sahara. Pollution levels in the capital and southeast England were rated at a maximum level of 10 on Thursday, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra)....

The bearded lizard thrives in the dry, hot interior of Australia, where summer temperatures routinely reach 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit), and occasionally much higher. But new research shows that any broods of Pogona vitticeps born at that time would be predominantly female, no matter what their genetics have to say about it. Ecologist Alexander Quinn of the University of Canberra in Australia and his colleagues incubated bearded lizard eggs at a range of temperatures....

Editor’s note: In her article, “Goldilocks Black Holes,” Jenny E. Greene discusses the search for black holes with masses ranging from roughly 1,000 suns to a million suns—middleweights on the cosmic scale. These intermediate-mass holes may provide clues about the origins of galaxies and the supermassive black holes (millions to billions of suns in mass) found at galaxy centers. Astronomers have now found hundreds of middleweight holes, in particular by analyzing data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has been recording light from galaxies across a large area of the sky for over a decade now....

Are you better than average as a driver? I know I am. I’ll bet 90 percent of you think you are, too, because this is the well-documented phenomenon known as the above-average effect, part of the psychology of optimism. According to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, “people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well....

As the world’s breadbaskets strain to meet the demands of the Earth’s growing population, already more than seven billion strong, we could use another nutritional, ecologically friendly food source. Could acorns, the fruits of the oak tree, be the answer? Certainly, they are beginning to draw renewed interest in the hunt for sustainable alternative food sources. Over the past decade various Web sites, magazines and newspapers have recommended that the occasional acorn-based items be reintroduced into our diets....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Nothing comes for free, especially online. Websites and apps that don’t charge you for their services are often collecting your data or bombarding you with advertising. Now some sites have found a new way to make money from you: using your computer to generate virtual currencies. Several video streaming sites and the popular file sharing network The Pirate Bay have allegedly been “cryptojacking” their users’ computers in this way, as has the free wifi provider in a Starbucks cafe in Argentina....

After obeying orders on the Red Planet for more than a year, NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has finally gotten its first taste of freedom. The 1-ton Curiosity rover used autonomous navigation for the first time on Tuesday (Aug. 27), driving itself onto a patch of ground that its handlers had not vetted in advance. The robot will likely employ this “autonav” capability more and more as it continues the long trek toward the base of Mars’ huge Mount Sharp, NASA officials said....

The COVID-19 pandemic has rendered the behavior of most Americans unrecognizable. Handshakes have turned into elbow bumps. School and work are conducted remotely. Socializing happens virtually. And now even our faces are becoming nearly unrecognizable as we don a mask in order to go out. Outside of an operating room or a bank robbery, masks are not the norm in Western countries. At times, face coverings, whether women’s veils or bandanas worn by demonstrators, have sparked outright bans....

Researchers have conjured up a trickle of electricity by zapping tiny nanowires with ultrasound. If they can grow that trickle into a stream, the technology might turn everyday vibrations into power for miniature sensors that could be sprinkled in the environment or implanted in the body. Everyone knows that nanotechnology means really small stuff, such as sensors that could be placed inside the body to monitor blood sugar or on the battlefield to sniff out poison gas....

Every day in the 1920s an Akita named Hachikō came to a Tokyo train station and waited to greet his owner when he got off the train. Even after the man died suddenly at work one day, Hachikō waited in vain at the station every day for his return, for nearly a decade. The profound loyalty of pets is only part of the joy they bring to our lives. Humans have kept close quarters with dogs and cats for millennia—they have served us as guard animals and pest control, but most important, they are often our truest companions and purest friends....

By Andrew R.C. Marshall and Manuel MogatoTACLOBAN, Philippines (Reuters) - The death toll from Typhoon Haiyan’s rampage through the Philippines is closer to 2,000 or 2,500 than the 10,000 previously estimated, President Benigno Aquino said on Tuesday as U.S. and British warships headed toward his nation to help with relief efforts.“Ten thousand, I think, is too much,” Aquino told CNN in an interview. “There was emotional drama involved with that particular estimate....

Key concepts Physics Potential energy Kinetic energy Conservation of energy Introduction Have you ever stretched a rubber band and launched it? Put that energy to use and build a rubber band–powered cotton ball launcher in this fun activity! Background When you stretch a rubber band it stores elastic potential energy—the energy stored inside a material when it is stretched, squished, bent or twisted. This is different from gravitational potential energy, which is stored in an object that is lifted off the ground....

Afew percentage points of improvement in energy efficiency are rarely noteworthy, but those digits add up fast when the technology involved annually consumes several hundred billion kilowatt-hours of electricity worldwide. About two thirds of the juice used by American industry, for example, drives the countless electric motors running pumps, compressors, fans, conveyors and other devices in factories and plants nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. After a decade-long R&D effort, engineers have succeeded in wresting a bit more efficiency from these motors....

The world’s largest oil sands producers signed an agreement yesterday to waive their intellectual property and patent rights in order to reduce the industry’s impact on greenhouse gases, agriculture and waterways. Twelve companies – including Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Cenovus Energy Inc. and ConocoPhillips Co. – formed Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance (COSIA) to eliminate redundancy in their research operations. The intent is for the participating companies – which represent more than 80 percent of Canada’s oil sands production – to no longer keep certain technologies proprietary so that each company essentially is working on a different aspect of the oil sands’ environmental footprint....

Everyone has seen a prism bend light. Now researchers have constructed a material that bends visible light in the opposite way. The odd effect, known as negative refraction, is similar to what is needed in far-out proposals for creating a cloak of invisibility. For now, however, the device only works in two dimensions, so construction of invisible spaceships will have to wait. In related news, another group used a similar trick to magnify light from objects too small to see with conventional lenses, which might someday prove useful in data storage....

A month after the probe into the poisoning of pet food began, government officials announced this week that a second contaminant had been found in protein additives that have sickened or killed hundreds of dogs and cats. The announcement came on the heels of another devastating discovery: batches of rice protein concentrate used in pet food were also laced with the first known culprit, melamine, a nitrogen-based compound used in commercial and industrial plastics....

Since Watson and Crick first revealed the double helix of our genetic code in 1953, scientists have gained the ability to give just about every living thing a genetic makeover. Unsurprisingly, given their humanitarian and economic importance, many of these alterations have been to crop plants. Many are being re-engineered to resist disease, drought and pests. Scientists are hoping to improve food security through greater yields and less waste, particularly in the face of climate change, but other researchers plan to tackle food security at its less obvious root: malnutrition....

Three-D printers have the potential to spark a revolution of creativity and self-sufficiency. It looks like this: you use your last drywall anchor in the middle of a shelving project and, instead of running to the hardware store, you turn on the printer. You design a nightlight in the shape of your child’s favorite animal and you turn on the printer. You need a spare house key and you turn on the printer....

Researchers are developing new ways to help the paralyzed communicate with their thoughts alone. Many of the new techniques rely on computers that analyze patients’ brain activity and translate it into letters or other symbols. In a study published online in June in Current Biology, Bettina Sorger of Maastricht University in the Netherlands and her colleagues taught six healthy adults to answer questions by selecting letters on a computer screen with their thoughts....

By Victoria Cavaliere SEATTLE (Reuters) - A newly sparked wildfire was burning unchecked on Monday in central Washington state, charring about a dozen homes and threatening wide evacuations as crews scrambled to contain the blaze in an unusually destructive fire season on the U.S. West Coast. The Snag Canyon fire was burning about 10 miles (16 km) northeast of the city of Ellensburg, east of the Cascade mountains, home to about 18,000 people and Central Washington University, fire officials said....