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Blood samples from elephant seals may help to explain how carbon monoxide — a poison — can stop inflammation, researchers have found.The seals routinely dive to depths of 500 meters and stay underwater for 25 minutes at a time, surfacing for just a few minutes between plunges. During these forays, blood flow to nonessential tissues and organs is restricted, but the tissues are not damaged. Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, suggest that high levels of carbon monoxide in the seals’ blood has a protective effect — echoing laboratory research on rats and mice that has found the gas has anti-inflammatory properties and can lead to better outcomes after organ transplant....

Theoretical physics is full of mind-boggling ideas, but two of the weirdest are quantum entanglement and wormholes. The first, predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics, describes a surprising type of correlation between objects (typically atoms or subatomic particles) having no apparent physical link. Wormholes, predicted by the general theory of relativity, are shortcuts that connect distant regions of space and time. Work done by several theorists, including myself, has suggested a connection between these two seemingly dissimilar concepts....

The most toxic and voluminous nuclear waste in the U.S.—208 million liters —sits in decaying underground tanks at the Hanford Site (a nuclear reservation) in southeastern Washington State. It accumulated there from the middle of World War II, when the Manhattan Project invented the first nuclear weapon, to 1987, when the last reactor shut down. The federal government’s current attempt at a permanent solution for safely storing that waste for centuries—the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant here—has hit a major snag in the form of potential chain reactions, hydrogen explosions and leaks from metal corrosion....

This week, a new Ford assembly plant in central Mexico began cranking out a first for Detroit automakers: a “dual clutch” automatic transmission designed to save fuel because it emulates a stick shift, only a computer is at the helm. Ford is also planning to turn its entire fleet to six-speed transmissions by 2013, bumping up its average miles-per-gallon rating with more exactly calibrated gears. The transmission will be paired with a more efficient engine and will appear next year in the Ford Fiesta, a compact European model the company is reintroducing in the United States after it failed to stick in the 1970s....

It was inevitable that the radio tags that let cars breeze through toll plazas would get placed on, or in, people. The sole elementary school in a California town 50 miles northwest of Sacramento raised hackles far and wide this past January when it tagged students with the same technology used to determine the whereabouts of cattle and to keep tabs on toilet paper rolls at Wal-Mart. The Brittan Elementary School in Sutter required the seventh- and eighth-grade students to wear a badge that sported a name, a photograph and a radio tag containing identification data that could be read automatically at attendance time....

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said yesterday that he welcomes “vigorous debate” on climate science. “We who are on the side of the consensus must remind ourselves that the evolution of knowledge thrives on debate,” Rajendra Pachauri said in an essay published on the website of the BBC. But Pachauri, whose panel has come under fire in recent months after revelations of multiple errors in its last major report, said he also believes that “many people either do not know, or have forgotten, what the IPCC actually is....

Dear EarthTalk: Has China been making any progress reducing its output of global warming gases, and/or in tackling other environmental problems? —Bill W., Saugus, MA Decades of rapid-fire development and lack of government oversight has meant that China now faces some serious environmental challenges. According to research by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, China surpassed the United States as the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases in 2006—and hasn’t looked back....

Editor’s Note (12/14/22): On Tuesday U.S. officials reported that, for the first time, a nuclear fusion facility created slightly more energy than it used in a fusion reaction. Last year Representative Don Beyer of Virginia explained how Congress can push fusion energy to help with the climate crisis and U.S. competitiveness. The existential threat of the climate emergency poses perhaps the greatest danger to human health and prosperity we have ever faced....

If a sibling or other close relation of yours ever went to prison for more than a year, suspicion of criminal behavior now extends to you. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently opened its forensic DNA database of felony offenders and certain other arrestees to allow states to share information that does not exactly match blood, semen or other crime scene evidence but may come close enough to finger a relative....

In Plato’s allegory of the cave, chained prisoners face a blank cavern wall from the time they are born, the only reality they have ever known. When people and objects passing behind the captives project shadows on the wall, the prisoners believe that their experience of the world is complete, never realizing that their knowledge is impoverished to a vast degree. A new virtual art exhibit, hosted by the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City, highlights how, whenever we examine a three-dimensional item from a single vantage point, we only ever observe a partial projection, or shadow, of the entire object in front of us....

Large storms with lots of rain, which are prominent in future climate predictions, have the potential to flood rivers and change the landscape. But gravelly rivers coming from the mountains have the ability to resist large, fast floods without permanently changing their banks and altering their courses, according to a new study of more than 186 rivers. “What we discovered was that rivers have this ability to self-regulate,” says Douglas Jerolmack, a geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania and an author of the report, published today in Science....

When the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge—better known as Prince William and Kate Middleton—married Friday, they sealed the deal with a ring made of gold mined in Wales. As an estimated two billion people worldwide watched the festivities, some viewers may have wondered, “When did gold form in Wales?” About 400 million years ago, ancient tectonic plates collided along a boundary that extended across what is now the Atlantic Ocean, underneath both Wales and North America....

Providing directions instantly online has until recently meant that navigational mapping programs, such as MapQuest and Google Maps, often simplify the problem by not considering every possible route to a destination. Scientists at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany have designed a computer application that can quickly calculate the most expedient of all possible driving routes without the need for excessive computation. Dominik Schultes, one of the project’s scientists, designed the program around a simple premise: driving somewhere usually requires crossing major intersections that are sparsely interconnected....

In 1995, 10 argentine soldiers witnessed a cataclysm that no other humans have ever seen, one that has since altered our understanding of climate change. The men were stationed at Matienzo Base, a dreary cluster of steel huts that sat atop a wedge of volcanic rock jutting from the sea, 50 kilometers off the coast of Antarctica. The island was surrounded by a plain of glacial ice covering 1,500 square kilometers—25 times the area of Manhattan....

Coral reefs are among nature’s most complex and colorful living formations. But as any underwater photographer knows, pictures of them taken without artificial lights often come out bland and blue. Even shallow water selectively absorbs and scatters light at different wavelengths, making certain features hard to see and washing out colors—especially reds and yellows. This effect makes it difficult for coral scientists to use computer vision and machine-learning algorithms to identify, count and classify species in underwater images; they have to rely on time-consuming human evaluation instead....

Motherhood is a difficult job. In fact, the results of a new study suggest that, historically, taking on the role early in life was linked to shorter lifespans. A report published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that mothers who gave birth at a young age in the 18th and 19th century also tended to die young. The results suggest that natural selection may have sacrificed a woman’s longevity for reproductive success....

Fires aided by climate change wrecked havoc last year across Australia. Now there’s a chance that water could help save the country from an even worse fate—and not just as a way to extinguish future blazes. An Australian utility has drawn up plans that would marry the country’s renewable energy power with a decades-old trick of hydro engineering. If successful, the design could help solve one of the biggest hurdles of renewable energy: finding a way to store excess power generated by wind turbines and solar panels....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Translating scientific research into safe and effective drugs takes money—lots of money. Current estimates put the cost of developing a single successful drug at more than $2 billion by the time you include all the dead ends along the way; the out-of-pocket cost for just a single attempt is about $200 million. Drug development usually takes a decade or longer, and the probability of success is low (historically around 5 percent for oncology)....

(Reuters) - Hundreds of firefighters on Sunday were battling a wildfire in southern California that prompted the evacuation of about 500 homes, local officials said. The Shirley Fire was only five percent contained and burning over 800 acres, sending smoke plumes across the Kern River Valley, about 130 miles (209 km) north east of Los Angeles. Mandatory evacuations of about 500 homes in proximity to the blaze northeast of the city of Bakersfield started Saturday, according to a statement from the Kern County Sheriff’s office....

Many African countries are bucking a global trend of having fewer babies and will continue to grow throughout the twenty-first century, a study suggests. The authors say that world population could top 12 billion by 2100, contradicting earlier predictions that it would peak at no more than 10 billion by mid-century. Although Africa now has a smaller population than India alone, by the end of the century it will almost have caught up with Asia as the most populated continent, researchers report on September 18 in Science....