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After the June Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturned nearly 50 years of abortion care precedent, several states have moved quickly to pass abortion-related legislation. This has frequently been in the form of restricting or protecting access to the medical procedure. But efforts to limit abortion aren’t solely about what happens in a medical facility. They can go far beyond that. A bill under consideration in South Carolina seeks to restrict what its residents will be able to read online about abortion....

Dear EarthTalk: Recent NASA photos showed the opening of the Northwest Passage and that a third of the Arctic’s sea ice has melted in recent. Are sea levels already starting to rise accordingly, and if so what effects is this having? – Dudley Robinson, Ireland Researchers were astounded when, in the fall of 2007, they discovered that the year-round ice pack in the Arctic Ocean had lost some 20 percent of its mass in just two years, setting a new record low since satellite imagery began documenting the terrain in 1978....

Climate science has from its very beginnings been a wonderfully multidisciplinary endeavor, encompassing biology, chemistry, history, paleoclimatology and, yes, physics. Fluid motion, thermodynamics of air and water, radiative transfer and the movement of the Earth on its orbit around the sun are all fundamental components that give rise to the complexity of the weather and climate system. But topics beyond physics also are key for understanding how life and climate have co-developed on Earth and how they might change in the future....

Key concepts Colors Solutions Molecules Chromatography Primary colors Introduction Do you love to use bright and vibrant colored art supplies such as markers or paints? Do you ever wonder how these colors are made? The variety of colors comes from colored molecules. These are mixed into the material—whether ink or paint—to make the product. Some colored molecules are synthetic (or man-made), such as “Yellow No. 5” found in some food dyes....

Scientific American: Is climate change a problem? Gary Yohe: Yes. I think it’s become increasingly clear that the risks associated with climate change are getting larger. The thresholds of what a lot of people would consider dangerous anthropogenic interference with climate are getting lower and therefore nearer in the future. It’s certainly something to take seriously. The evidence over the last five years has essentially been moving in only one direction, and the new knowledge says that climate change is more of a problem than we thought even five years ago....

Editor’s Note (1/10/23): This story is being republished because the town of Montecito, Calif., was evacuated on Monday following concerns that torrential rains from atmospheric river storms might trigger deadly mudslides in the burn scar of the Thomas Fire like those that happened exactly five years prior. At 3:30 A.M. on January 9, 2018, half an inch of rain poured down on the charred slopes of the Santa Ynez Mountains in coastal southern California....

In a first-of-its-kind finding, researchers note that large quakes off Japan’s northeastern coast are often presaged by subtle movements on submarine fault zones. Although these speedups in slippage along submarine faults, discernable by GPS equipment onshore, will not enable researchers to make a “We’re gonna have a magnitude 7.3 quake next Thursday at 3:37 P.M.” sort of prediction, they do provide insights into general patterns of seismic activity in the region and may ultimately give scientists a better understanding of what is happening along fault zones....

Times are grim for the king of the beasts. Roughly 35,000 African lions roam the savannahs, down from more than 100,000 half a century ago, thanks to habitat loss, declining numbers of prey animals and killing by humans. One study estimated that fewer than 50lions (Panthera leo) live in Nigeria and reported no sign of the animal in the Republic of the Congo, Ghana or Cte d’Ivoire. Now a king-sized controversy is brewing over a proposal to shore up lion populations before it is too late....

Scientists searching for quasicrystals—so-called ‘impossible’ materials with unusual, non-repeating structures—have identified one in remnants of the world’s first nuclear bomb test. The previously unknown structure, made of iron, silicon, copper and calcium, probably formed from the fusion of vapourized desert sand and copper cables. Similar materials have been synthesized in the laboratory and identified in meteorites, but this one, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 17 May, is the first example of a quasicrystal with this combination of elements....

We’ve gotten our first glimpse at the next version of Google Glass, and it looks a lot like the first edition of Google’s augmented reality headgear — though with a few key differences. The pictures of a new Google Glass headset come from an FCC filing first spotted by 9to5Google. They show a headset that looks an awful lot like the one Google stopped selling back in January, though the prism on this version appears larger for an expanded field of view....

Digital light processing (DLP), the technology behind high-definition television and digital cinema–as well as 3-D image rendering now under development that could lead to breakthroughs in medical diagnoses and treatment–turns 20 this month. Introduced by Texas Instruments (TI) in 1987, DLP technology uses an optical semiconductor called a digital micromirror device (DMD) to digitally modulate light. A DMD does this using a rectangular array of microscopic mirrors that corresponds to light in a projected image....

The nation’s oil and gas wells produce at least nine billion liters of contaminated water per day, according to an Argonne National Laboratory report. And that is an underestimate of the amount of brine, fracking fluid and other contaminated water that flows back up a well along with the natural gas or oil, because it is based on incomplete data from state governments gathered in 2007. The volume will only get larger, too: oil and gas producers use at least 7....

In 2012 the U.S. will join dozens of nations around the world in labeling cigarette packages with large photographs of diseased organs, amputated limbs and other gruesome images. Previous research has borne out the idea that when people see images of cigarette-induced ailments, they are reminded of their own mortality. But a study presented in May at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science suggests that reminders of mortality might not always have the desired effect....

Today the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives will begin debate on a bill key to national research funding and priorities. The Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology (FIRST) Act of 2014 (H.R. 4186) would, among other things, require the National Science Foundation to cut research for social sciences and economics and certify to Congress that each taxpayer-funded grant it issues is in the national interest. Last week Scientific American published an interview with Neal Lane, a former White House science advisor, that was critical of the FIRST Act....

Take that, Jupiter! The largest planet in the solar system just got whacked by an asteroid or a comet, and some intrepid stargazers have captured the planet’s latest collision on camera. Amateur astronomer John McKeon was observing the king of planets by telescope from Swords, Ireland, on March 17 when he captured this stunning time-lapse video of something hitting Jupiter. McKeon was recording the transit of Jupiter’s moons Io and Ganymede with an 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and his ASI120mm camera when something struck Jupiter, and he struck cosmic pay dirt....

By Dan Whitcomb LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Mudslides and flash floods that raged through Southern California mountains following heavy rains killed one man, damaged homes and cut off a foothill community, leaving rescuers clearing blocked roads and residents cleaning up on Monday. The mudslides and flooding were triggered by weekend thunderstorms that unleashed some five inches of rain in less than two hours in parts of San Bernardino County, east of Los Angeles, San Bernardino firefighter and public information officer Chris Prater said....

NASA’s next low-budget planetary mission will land a probe on Mars in 2016 to study why the Red Planet went down such a different evolutionary path than Earth did, the agency announced today (Aug. 20). The new mission, called InSight, will attempt to determine whether Mars’ core is liquid or solid, and why the Red Planet’s crust does not appear to be composed of drifting tectonic plates like Earth’s is. Such information could help scientists better understand how rocky planets form and evolve, researchers said....

Seeking to assess the effect of third-party prayer on patient outcomes, investigators found no evidence for divine intervention. They did, however, detect a possible proof for the power of negative thinking. The three-year Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), published in the April 4 American Heart Journal, was the largest-ever attempt to apply scientific methods to measure the influence of prayer on the well-being of another. It examined 1,800 patients undergoing heart-bypass surgery....

It is a long way from the slender nanotube—a chicken-wirelike cylinder of carbon a billionth of a meter thick—to a revolution in electronics. The very smallness that makes nanoscale materials so attractive as components of next-generation electronics also makes them extremely challenging to manipulate collectively. Investigators in the field hope, therefore, to realize commercial devices by piggybacking on existing manufacturing techniques. This year has seen several demonstrations of how nanoscale components might be integrated with conventional manufacturing as well as a report outlining a regulatory protocol for nanomaterials....

About 400 years ago in Austria, someone wrapped the body of a baby boy in a beautiful silk coat, placed him in an unlabeled wooden coffin and sealed his corpse in a family crypt. In this environment, protected from outside air, the child’s body mummified. Now researchers studying this mummy have finally matched the anonymous little boy with a name: Reichard Wilhelm, part of the elite Starhemberg family of Upper Austria....