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Dear EarthTalk: How much “old growth” forest is left in the United States and is it all protected from logging at this point? – John Foye, via e-mail As crazy as it sounds, no one really knows how much old growth is left in America’s forested regions, mainly because various agencies and scientists have different ideas about how to define the term. Generally speaking, “old growth” refers to forests containing trees often hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It’s no secret that United States–Russia relations are currently rife with tension and mistrust. The news is full of reports of Russia meddling in U.S. elections, seeding U.S. media with fake news, supporting the Syrian regime and so on. The relationship between the two countries has reached an all-time low since the fall of the Soviet Union, with some going so far as to call it a new “cold war....

The vast region of deserts, grasslands and sparse wood­lands that stretches across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia is by far the most crisis-ridden part of the planet. With the exception of a few highly affluent states in the Persian Gulf, these dryland countries face severe and intensifying challenges, including frequent and deadly droughts, encroaching deserts, burgeoning populations and extreme poverty. The region scores at the very bottom of the United Nations’s Index of Human Development, which ranks countries according to their incomes, life expectancy and educational attainments....

Bird flu, cholera, Ebola, plague and tuberculosis are just a few of the diseases likely to spread and get worse as a result of climate change, according to a report released yesterday by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). To prevent such ailments from becoming as destructive as the “black death” (which wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century) or the flu pandemic of 1918 (which killed an estimated 20 million to 40 million people worldwide, including between 500,000 and 675,000 people in the U....

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - After five years of drought in central Chile, there is a good chance that the El Niño weather pattern could bring much-needed rains during the Southern Hemisphere’s winter, the national meteorological service said on Thursday. In recent years, power producers in the world’s top copper producer have been forced to rely on more-expensive fossil fuels as the lack of rain has dented hydroelectric generation. Over 40 percent of installed capacity in Chile’s central power grid, which supplies electricity to nine out of every 10 residents, is in hydrogeneration....

It’s been a good year for fuel cells. In September, the HY4, the first hydrogen fuel-cell-powered passenger aircraft, took flight in Germany. French industrial giant Alstom also unveiled a fuel-cell-powered train. Several automakers in the United States now offer fuel-cell-powered cars for sale as hardware costs have plummeted. Toyota Motor Corp. ramped up production of its hydrogen fuel-cell-powered car, the Mirai, from 700 units last year to 2,000 this year, and is aiming to make 3,000 in 2017....

An even worse finding for the United States in terms of greenhouse gases is that some of its oil and gas fields are emitting more methane than the industry does, on average, in the rest of the world, the research suggests. “I would have thought that emissions in the U.S. should be relatively low compared to the global average,” said Stefan Schwietzke, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth Systems Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo....

Water and food security are highly intertwined issues and they ultimately depend on the sustainable use of natural resources. Looking ahead, sustainability is a big challenge as the population continues to grow; as does the demand for better living standards. Added to the equation, climate change is enhancing business and societal risks through its impacts on natural resources and the costs of emissions mitigation targets. Both effects call for integrated adaptation and mitigation solutions — such as better water management and lower energy use — along the supply chains of products....

An international group of scientists is calling for stricter regulations to protect marine wildlife from noise pollution. In a study published last week in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, researchers argue that action is needed to tackle excessive ocean noise from industrial activities such as shipping and seismic surveys, which use loud sound pulses fired from compressed air guns to explore the sea floor and find natural resources....

Correction appended. U.S. nuclear power companies will be directed to reassess their reactors’ vulnerability to an elevated threat from earthquakes east of the Rockies, using new computer models and seismic data released today by an industry and government project. The Central and Eastern U.S. Seismic Model incorporates four years of research triggered by estimates that earthquake hazards centered in New Madrid, Mo.; Charleston, S.C.; and other fault areas could be worse than current nuclear reactors were designed to withstand....

Physicists use particle accelerators to answer some of the most profound questions about the nature of the universe. These gargantuan machines accelerate charged particles to nearly the speed of light and then smash them together, re-creating the conditions that existed when our universe was cataclysmically born in the big bang. By analyzing the debris of the collisions, physicists hope to understand how the seemingly disparate forces and particles that exist in our universe are all connected and described by a unified theory....

Russia’s scientific community is in turmoil. This week has seen protests, tense Kremlin negotiations and even a police raid. President Vladimir Putin has warned scientists that they need to come up with “big, good, socially useful results” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a centuries-old network including hundreds of research institutions, which many fear could spell the end of academic independence. Physicist Vladimir Fortov, acting head of the Academy as well as editor in chief of Scientific American’s Russian-language edition V Mire Nauki, has been leading the charge to minimize the impact of a controversial reform bill....

Sea levels across the globe will rise faster than at any time throughout human history if the Earth’s warming continues beyond 2 degrees Celsius. The Atlantic coast of North America will be one of the worst-hit areas as melting glaciers cause the sea level to rise over the next century, a new study published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds. However, that rise is not expected to be uniform, as gravity and the movement of the ocean will play a role in how the water is distributed, and some areas will be hit worse than others....

Editor’s Note: The following is an adapted excerpt of Should We Eat Meat?: Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory, by Vaclav Smil. Wiley-Blackwell, May 2013. There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many fundamental ways. Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth. Cooperative hunting promoted the development of language and socialization; the evolution of Old World societies was, to a significant extent, based on domestication of animals; in traditional societies, meat eating, more than the consumption of any other category of foodstuffs, has led to fascinating preferences, bans and diverse foodways; and modern Western agricultures are obviously heavily meat-oriented....

Scientists have come a step closer to gaining complete control over a mind, even if that mind belongs to a creature the size of a grain of sand. A team at Harvard University has built a computerized system to manipulate worms—making them start and stop, giving them the sensation of being touched, and even prompting them to lay eggs, as seen in the video above—by stimulating their neurons individually with laser light, all while the worms swim freely in a petri dish....

Key concepts Music Sounds Physics Sound waves Introduction Have you ever blown across a bottle’s top and made a pleasant, resonant sound? If so, have you wondered exactly how that note is made? A bottle is actually what is called a “closed-end air column.” Clarinets and some organ pipes are examples of musical instruments that work in the same way. In this science activity you will use bottles to investigate how the length of a closed-end air column affects the pitch of the note that it makes....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich Staggering home from the supermarket laden with bags of shopping, it would be impossible–and more than a little silly–to rock your torso quickly back and forth while swinging your legs in loopy, pendulum-like steps. But if you were able to take a cue from a theoretical walker that does just that, you might save yourself some energy.So say Andy Ruina, an engineer at Cornell University in Ithaca, and Mario Gomes, a mechanical engineer at the Rochester Institute of Technology, both in New York, whose torso-rocking walker has the most energy-efficient gait of any yet discovered....

The same printer technology that sits on your desk could soon be a common fixture in rebuilding human tissue, treating burns by laying down layers of a patients’ own skin or even rebuilding whole organs. A team at Wake Forest University has built a “bioprinter” that uses cells instead of ink. It even uses an ordinary, off-the-shelf printhead, connected to test tubes full of different cell types instead of wells full of colored inks....

Together with the World Economic Forum, Scientific American convened an international Steering Group of leading technology experts and engaged in an intense process to identify this year’s “Top 10 Emerging Technologies.” After soliciting nominations from additional experts around the globe, the Steering Group evaluated dozens of proposals according to a number of criteria: Do the suggested technologies have the potential to provide major benefits to societies and economies? Could they alter established ways of doing things?...

Devils Tower in Wyoming is such an extraordinary sight that its creation myth almost seems possible. Giant bears are said to have scratched its surface attempting to climb to the top. But the vertical lines adorning the sides of the almost 390-meter-tall rock are not claw marks. They are actually the edges of roughly hexagonal columns of igneous rock, similar to other geometric landmarks such as Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway or Devils Postpile in California....