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On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks Knopf, 2015 ($27.95) In his new book, neurologist and bestselling author Sacks takes readers on a journey across decades and continents. His scientific proclivities are in evidence throughout—in his childhood chemistry experiments, his studies of the brain and even his dabbling in psychoactive drugs. But it is the stories of human triumphs and losses, whether intimate romantic encounters or the deaths of great friends, that will likely remain with his readers longest....

APRIL 1956 URANIUM SPREAD–“The U.S. will release 88,000 pounds of fissionable uranium 235 for research and development and for fueling nuclear power reactors, President Eisenhower announced last month. Half of the uranium will be sold or leased to approved groups in the U.S.; the rest will be available to foreign nations. The U.S.S.R. and its satellites are excluded from the plan; so are Britain and Canada, which already make nuclear fuel....

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Washington state agreed yesterday to coordinate environmental reviews and establish licensing schedules for emerging hydrokinetic technologies. FERC authorizes operating licenses for marine projects that produce energy from oceans and rivers, including wave and tidal power. States must sign off on environmental issues related to coastal zone management and pollution in their waters. Other federal entities, including the Interior Department, must conduct environmental, safety and security reviews....

A dozen brain regions, working together, create feelings of passionate love. Stephanie Ortigue of Syracuse University and her colleagues worldwide compared MRI studies of people who indicated they were either in love or were experiencing maternal or unconditional love. The comparison revealed a “passion network”—the red regions shown here at various angles. The network releases neurotransmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that create the sensations of attraction, arousal, pleasure…and obsession....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has added dozens of scientific accounts about global warming threats to a key document that is expected to help drive federal regulations for curbing U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases, according to an agency draft [PDF] obtained by Greenwire. Twenty-eight EPA scientists, engineers and other career employees are now working on a nearly 2-year-old “technical support document” that synthesizes climate research on everything from melting sea ice to forest fires and air pollution....

In late March 2012, Kari Norgaard, a University of Oregon sociology and environmental studies professor, was flying home from a conference in England. She landed in Washington, D.C., checked her email and noticed a message from Marc Morano, a global warming skeptic who runs the blog Climate Depot, criticizing the research she had presented at the conference. Norgaard was surprised Morano had noticed her, because although her university had written a press release, she hadn’t seen much coverage of her research, which focuses on why it is so difficult for societies to take action to respond to climate change....

Our perception of the world seems so effortless that we take it for granted. But think of what is involved when you look at even the simplest visual scene. You are given two tiny, upside-down images in your eyeballs, yet what you see is a unified three-dimensional world. This phenomenon, as the late neuropsychologist Richard Gregory once said, is “nothing short of a miracle.” In practice, this “miraculous” process involves our brain making use of a number of different cues....

A group of happy people exits the lobby of the Luxor Hotel and climbs aboard a sightseeing bus, excited to begin a second day touring Las Vegas. The men and women chat and laugh, poking fun at one another about events that happened the night before. But it is remarkably quiet. Only their hands are moving as they look at their partners, their faces and body positions emphasizing their words. The other passengers on the bus sit there awkwardly, surprised to be excluded from the energetic conversations....

Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to an unearthly figure with blood dripping down its fangs. You try to scream, but you can’t. You can’t move a single muscle! If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably experienced an episode of sleep paralysis, which involves the inability to move or speak upon falling asleep or awakening and is often coupled with hallucinations. About one in five people have had sleep paralysis at least once....

For most Americans, the motto of the medical community, “First, do no harm,” is both familiar and uncontroversial. Mental health care professionals subscribe to similar codes. But look around the scientific and public discussions about psychological interventions—programs to make you feel better, encourage healthier choices and treat mental health problems—and you will notice little concern about possible harm. The late psychologist Scott Lilienfeld attempted to raise awareness of the risk of harm in his article “Psychological Treatments That Cause Harm,” in which he determined a provisional list of “potentially harmful therapies” (PHTs) that should be reconsidered....

The northern leopard frogs that inhabit the boreal U.S. have never recovered from some catastrophic population declines in the 1970s. Some blame it on the acidifying lakes and streams caused by coal-burning, others point to the ongoing loss of wetlands to development, and now new evidence shows that the herbicide atrazine—widely sprayed on crop fields throughout the region—is killing the frogs by helping parasitic worms that feast on them. “Atrazine provides a double whammy to frogs: It increases both amphibian exposure and susceptibility,” says biologist Jason Rohr of the University of South Florida in Tampa, who tested the impact by re-creating field conditions in 300-gallon (1,135-liter) tanks in his lab....

1968 Pluripotent Cells “The best evidence for the retention of genes in fully differentiated cells comes from experiments carried out at the University of Oxford on eggs of the frog Xenopus. The first experiments with intestine cell nuclei were designed to show that at least some of these nuclei possess all the genes necessary for the differentiation of all cell types, and therefore that some of the transplant embryos derived from intestine nuclei could be reared into normal adult frogs....

To reach one of the world’s most secretive nuclear-fusion companies, visitors must wind their way through a suburban office park at the foot of the Santa Ana Mountains, just east of Irvine, California, until they pull up outside the large but unmarked headquarters of Tri Alpha Energy. This is as close as any outsider can get without signing a non-disclosure agreement; Tri Alpha protects its trade secrets so tightly that it does not even have a website....

When we drive somewhere new, we navigate by referring to a two-dimensional map that accounts for distances only on a horizontal plane. According to research published online in August in Nature Neuroscience, the mammalian brain seems to do the same, collapsing the world into a flat plane even as the animal skitters up trees and slips deep into burrows. “Our subjective sense that our map is three-dimensional is illusory,” says Kathryn Jeffery, a behavioral neuroscientist at University College London who led the research....

The asteroid belt surrounds the inner solar system like a rocky, ring-shaped moat, extending out from the orbit of Mars to that of Jupiter. But there are voids in that moat, most notably where the orbital influence of Jupiter is especially potent; any asteroid unlucky enough to venture into one of those so-called Kirkwood gaps (named for mathematician Daniel Kirkwood) will be perturbed and ejected from the cozy confines of the belt, often winding up on a collision course with one of the inner, rocky planets (such as Earth) or the moon....

Multicellularity has its advantages, but they come at a price. The division of labor in a complex organism means that every cell must perform its job and only its job, so an elaborate regulatory system evolved to keep cells in line. Nearly every one of the trillion or so cells in the human body, for instance, contains a full copy of the genome – the complete instruction set for building and maintaining a human being....

More than 500 cities around the globe are already feeling the effects of climate change, according to a report released this week. “Cities at Risk” by the environmental nonprofit CDP found that 85% of cities surveyed last year are reporting climate hazards—including flooding in London, extreme winters in New York City, and forest fires and extreme heat in Quito, Ecuador. Kyra Appleby, director of CDP’s cities program, said 620 cities responded last year to the annual survey that began in 2011 with just 48 responses....

For decades, diesel trucks and buses have spewed large amounts of soot, smog-causing gases and carcinogens into the air. But new diesel engines are more than 90 percent cleaner than a few years ago, far exceeding the emission reductions required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, according to a new study released Thursday. The quest to clean up diesels has been mounted for several decades, yet its progress has long lagged behind the success stories of car exhaust....

By Keith Coffman DENVER (Reuters) - Colorado health and environment officials on Sunday approved new rules to limit air pollution from oil and gas drilling in the state, including what regulators said is the nation’s first-ever plan to detect and reduce methane emissions. The new measures were adopted to reduce the release of methane during production and transport of natural gas, in a deal first proposed last fall with energy producers Anadarko Petroleum, Noble Energy, Encana Corp and the Environmental Defense Fund....

A democracy relies on an electorate of critical thinkers. Yet formal education, which is driven by test taking, is increasingly failing to require students to ask the kind of questions that lead to informed decisions. More than a decade ago cognitive scientists John D. Bransford and Daniel L. Schwartz, both then at Vanderbilt University, found that what distinguished young adults from children was not the ability to retain facts or apply prior knowledge to a new situation but a quality they called “preparation for future learning....