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By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON (Reuters) - African climate negotiators attending the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington this week said leadership from the United States is critical to finalizing a global deal on measures to address climate change in 2015 after years of deadlock. Officials from Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana and Ethiopia said they were optimistic an agreement could be reached, even though many U.S. lawmakers, particularly Republicans, oppose signing a binding treaty requiring cuts in greenhouse gas emissions....

A surprise meteor strike over central Russia this morning lit up the skies, blew out windows on the ground and injured roughly 1,000 people in and around Chelyabinsk, a city of 1.1 million. The inbound object, thought to be a small asteroid, had not been discovered prior to impact. But already teams on the ground are reportedly collecting possible fragments of the meteorite, and researchers around the globe are scrambling to figure out what happened....

Scientific American presents House Call Doctor by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordability Care Act, I was reminded of my experiences working in the public health system, taking care of many patients without health insurance. Along with losing their jobs, their homes, and their life as they knew it, many people also lost their health insurance....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Our mobile phones can reveal a lot about ourselves: where we live and work; who our family, friends and acquaintances are; how (and even what) we communicate with them; and our personal habits. With all the information stored on them, it isn’t surprising that mobile device users take steps to protect their privacy, like using PINs or passcodes to unlock their phones....

By Verna GatesBIRMINGHAM, Ala (Reuters) - A necropsy will be performed on a four-month old rhinoceros believed to have been the first of its species to be born through artificial insemination in the United States, officials from the Montgomery Zoo in Alabama said on Monday.The endangered Indian rhino, which had become a popular attraction, was found dead on Friday, the zoo said.“It was a shock. We definitely feel the loss of Ethan,” Steve Pierce, the zoo’s program services manager, said of the rhinoceros....

We are no longer completely at sea when it comes to the creatures that thrive beneath the ocean’s surface, thanks to a decadelong effort to document marine diversity. The Census of Marine Life, an ambitious project to catalogue sea life, was prompted by estimates that science had sampled marine biota in only 0.1 percent of the volume of the world’s oceans. The results compiled from this global collaboration of more than 2,700 scientists from 80 nations will be released in October, although some findings have been published in advance in a series of 12 papers available online August 2 in PLoS One....

Over the last few decades, and particularly in recent years, the area of the Arctic Ocean covered by a skin of sea ice has steadily shrunk. But it’s not just this extent that matters—the volume of sea ice, which takes into account its thickness, is also important, but traditionally much more difficult to measure. The 2010 launch of the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite finally allowed scientists to take a wide-scale view of Arctic sea ice volume, and the first five years of data have yielded some surprises....

Lethal injection was invented in 1977 by Oklahoma state medical examiner Jay Chapman, who, based on his own experiences under anesthesia, concocted the drug cocktail from an ultrashort-acting barbiturate and a chemical paralytic. He added a heart-stopping drug to the mix to provide a painless, quick death with built-in redundancy. If one drug didn’t kill the death row inmate, one of the other two would. But dosage is critical to the efficacy of lethal injection according to a new study, which found that if any of the doses are off the recipient not only feels pain, but he or she also must suffer a slow death by the asphyxiation following total paralysis....

Suppose someone—let’s call her Alice—has a book of secrets she wants to destroy so she tosses it into a handy black hole. Given that black holes are nature’s fastest scramblers, acting like giant garbage shredders, Alice’s secrets must be pretty safe, right? Now suppose her nemesis, Bob, has a quantum computer that’s entangled with the black hole. (In entangled quantum systems, actions performed on one particle similarly affect their entangled partners, regardless of distance or even if some disappear into a black hole....

Scientific American presents Nutrition Diva by Quick & Dirty Tips. Scientific American and Quick & Dirty Tips are both Macmillan companies. Nutrition Diva listener Gary sent in a doozy of a question. He writes: Every year, when I go for my vision check-up, my eye doctor recommends a special vitamin supplement that’s supposed to protect my eyes – specifically, one she sells in her office. Every year I decline, indicating that I eat the recommended servings of vegetables and fruits (which, as you confirmed in a recent post) should be sufficient....

Only the speediest of skywatchers will have a chance to see the total lunar eclipse rising Saturday: NASA predicts that the total phase of the lunar eclipse will only last about 5 minutes, making it the shortest lunar eclipse of the century. Early-rising observers all over the United States should be able to see at least the partial phases of the April 4 lunar eclipse just before the sun rises, if weather permits....

When talking about his department’s role in steering U.S. energy policy, Energy Secretary Steven Chu likes to recall its role in last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s true that we had no jurisdictional or regulatory authority in the deepwater spill,” Chu said in an interview with ClimateWire late last week. “We played a different role. We helped stop the leak.” Chu’s behind-the-scenes war room is widely credited with bringing order to chaos in the aftermath of the BP PLC Macondo blowout in April 2010....

Most people handle stress well, but some find it difficult to cope and as a result develop depression and other mood disorders. Researchers have previously been able to identify the part of the brain that controls this response, but not exactly how it does so. Now, a study in mice identifies a small group of neurons that could be responsible. The research might also help elucidate the mechanism of deep brain stimulation, a therapy that uses electrical impulses to treat depression and other neurological disorders....

The first new nuclear reactor ordered in the U.S. in roughly three decades is beginning to take shape near Augusta, Ga. Southern Company and its partners have dug 27.5 meters down to reach bedrock and are now refilling the hole to provide a stable, anchored foundation for what is likely to be the first of a new generation of reactors in the U.S.: two new AP1000 models at the Vogtle Electric Generating Plant that stand next to two older pressurized water reactors, which came online in the 1980s—the first of some 14 AP1000s and 20 new reactors in total that may be built in the U....

Homosexual behavior seems pointedly un-Darwinian. An animal that doesn’t pass along genes by mating with the opposite sex at every, well, conceivable opportunity, seems to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. So what’s in it for the 450-plus species that go for same-sex sex? Two evolutionary biologists from University of California, Riverside, set out to answer that question in a paper published today in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. “It’s been observed a lot,” says Nathan Bailey, a post-doctoral researcher at U....

By Will Dunham WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) - Genetic information from a 35,000-year-old wolf bone found below a frozen cliff in Siberia is shedding new light on humankind’s long relationship with dogs, showing canine domestication may have occurred earlier than previously thought. Today’s dogs, from the Chihuahua to the Great Dane, are believed to have descended from wild wolves domesticated by humans in prehistoric times, but when this took place has been a matter of debate....

Federal scientists say a virus related to human measles is likely to blame for the mass die-off of bottlenose dolphins along the East Coast. Based on the last outbreak, they say it could affect the species until next year. Since July 1, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says 333 dead or sickly bottlenose dolphins have washed up from North Carolina to New York. That’s over nine times the historical average for strandings during this period....

By Delcan ButlerAs protests continue in Egypt against President Hosni Mubarak, Hassan Azzazy, a chemist and associate dean for graduate studies and research at the non-profit, private American University in Cairo, tells Nature how research and education have suffered under the regime.What is your assessment of the Mubarak regime’s track record in research?What record? I am not sure that a government that uses plain-clothes police and thugs to crush protests and kill peaceful protesters would even understand what scientific research means....

By Alison AbbottGiven the right conditions, any adult cell can be coaxed into becoming stem-cell like, according to a team of researchers based in the United States. The team, led by Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, were also able to speed up the process, cutting the time required for cells to become stem-cell like by around half.The results are good news for those battling to work out the complex biology of these cells, know as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – which can develop into any other cell type....

By Susan Young of Nature magazineThe Taínos were the first Native Americans to meet European explorers in the Caribbean. They soon fell victim to the diseases and violence brought by the outsiders, and today no Taínos remain.But the footprints of this extinct ethnicity are scattered throughout the genomes of modern Puerto Ricans, according to geneticist Carlos Bustamante at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California. On average, the genomes of Puerto Ricans contain 10 to 15% Native American DNA, which is largely Taíno, says Bustamante....