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Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell has directed the agency’s regions and research stations to jointly produce draft “landscape conservation action plans” by March 1 to guide its day-to-day response to climate change. In a memo earlier this month requesting the plans, Tidwell said climate change is “dramatically reshaping” how the agency will deliver on its mission of sustaining the health and diversity of the nation’s forests. He focused particularly on water management....

Last year, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched a study of a curious and controversial condition known as Morgellons disease, which is characterized by creeping, crawling and stinging sensations under the skin. The project, whose goal is to identify possible risk factors and causes, was prompted by pressure from afflicted people, along with the advocacy groups and Congressmen that represent them, according to CDC spokesperson Lola Russell....

When I was growing up, my mother used to say, “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” Yet popular wisdom also tells us that “nice guys finish last” and that “nice girls don’t get the corner office.” Like most sayings, these last two contain a grain of truth, but they overstate the challenges and overlook the considerable benefits of being nice. Psychologists define nice people as those scoring high on a personality trait called agreeableness....

Since 1942 the science talent search first sponsored by Westinghouse, and later by the Intel Corporation, has launched approximately 2,500 young finalists and winners into the national limelight. Every year, we marvel at these high school students’ projects. Some prove mathematical theorems. Some develop potential new cancer detection techniques. We wonder what amazing things these precocious young people will do with their lives. The “Where are they now?” column seeks to answer this question....

In the landmark decision of 2047, now credited as the third great decoupling of humanity and nature, America and the European Republic threw their weight behind the G77 plan to implement solar geoengineering—to lower temperatures by deflecting some of the sun’s radiation with particles sprayed into the atmosphere. The project drew a fierce objection from a coalition of deep-green environmentalists and energy companies that had invested in oil exploration in the (now ice-free) Arctic....

Everyone knows what gravity is. A baby at three months will express surprise if a box does not topple as expected; a one-year-old knows whether a precarious object will fall or not depending on its shape. Scientists came to think of gravity as a pull to Earth and later, in a more generalized way, as a force of attraction between any two masses. Then came Albert Einstein. In 1915 he revealed in his general theory of relativity that gravity is not a force so much as the by-product of a curving universe....

It’s official! Two tiny moons orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto finally have new names: Styx and Kerberos. The International Astronomical Union — the organization responsible for naming celestial objects — has approved “Kerberos” and “Styx” as the new monikers for two of Pluto’s moons that were previously called P4 and P5 respectively, but fans of TV’s “Star Trek” might not be too happy about the new names. The IAU selected the names based on the results of the Pluto Rocks Internet poll sponsored by SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but the top vote-getter, Vulcan, ultimately wasn’t chosen as a name for one of the tiny moons....

By David Alexander WASHINGTON, Jan 9 (Reuters) - U.S. Air Force reservists who did maintenance on C-123 aircraft used during the Vietnam war to spray the defoliant Agent Orange could have been exposed to harmful levels of dioxin even long after the conflict, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences said on Friday. A panel from the Institute of Medicine acknowledged the poor quality of sampling data available from the planes used in Operation Ranch Hand in Vietnam, but concluded that Air Force reservists who maintained the contaminated planes long after the conflict could have increased risk of health problems....

False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years. The problem is rampant in economics, the social sciences and even the natural sciences, but it is particularly egregious in biomedicine. Many studies that claim some drug or treatment is beneficial have turned out not to be true. We need only look to conflicting findings about beta-carotene, vitamin E, hormone treatments, Vioxx and Avandia. Even when effects are genuine, their true magnitude is often smaller than originally claimed....

For years, climate scientists have been saying that time is increasingly of the essence if the world is to stave off the worst effects of the climate crisis. But they have repeated it once again in the third and final installment of the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was released on Monday. The technology to do so is on hand, they emphasized, if governments can commit to the needed changes in policy....

It is hard to believe that our mundane social media banter could have an impact on the civil war that has been raging in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for more than a decade. The problem is not the content of these messages; it is the devices used to send them. Smartphones, tablets, PCs and other gadgets often have electronic components made from so-called conflict minerals—gold, tantalum, tin and tungsten—taken from specific mines in the D....

Oxygen from plants As an atmospheric scientist, much of my work focuses on exchanges of various gases between Earth’s surface and the atmosphere. Many elements, including oxygen, constantly cycle between land-based ecosystems, the oceans and the atmosphere in ways that can be measured and quantified. But virtually all of the oxygen produced by photosynthesis each year is consumed by living organisms and fires. Trees constantly shed dead leaves, twigs, roots and other litter, which feeds a rich ecosystem of organisms, mostly insects and microbes....

Driverless cars should have a fairly easy time getting the green light to operate on U.S. roadways, as long as they look and act like the vehicles people have been driving for the past century. Take away the steering wheel and brake pedal—as Google hopes to do from its self-driving car—and that vehicle is no longer street legal and probably would not be for some time, according to a new report from the U....

Editor’s note: we are publishing this article on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912 Scientific American Vol. CVI, No. 17, April 27, 1912 An iceberg is a fragment of a glacier. Inch by inch the huge river of ice which we call a glacier creeps toward the sea, and here its projecting end is broken off by the action of the waves....

To obtain nutrients for a growing fetus, a placenta embeds itself into the uterus—an “invasion” that resembles the way a tumor takes over healthy tissue. Now researchers have identified genes that help to regulate placental embedding and may prove instructive in developing anticancer drugs, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Scientists knew that the amount a placenta embeds varies across species. In some, such as humans and apes, placenta cells push deep into the uterine wall with relative ease....

This much is clear: frogs are dying. One third of the world’s 6,260 amphibian species are globally threatened or extinct. The primary threat to their survival is still habitat destruction, which impacts 61 percent of known amphibian species. But climate change and the deadly chytrid fungus could potentially take the lead over the next century—or at least make things much, much worse for frogs, salamanders and their legless, subterranean cousins known as caecilians....

Scientists have long sought to build lasers from silicon. Such an advance would enable engineers to incorporate both electronic and optical devices onto cheap silicon chips rather than being compelled to employ costly-to-make lasers based on “exotic” semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide or indium phosphide. Silicon lasers could lead to affordable light-based systems that harness photons instead of electrons to shuttle huge amounts of data swiftly–at multigigabit-per-second rates. Two research groups, one at the University of California at Los Angeles and the other at Intel Corporation, have recently reported success in making silicon emit continuous laser light....

A pair of NASA spacecraft is getting set to orbit the moon this weekend, a move that will kick off the probes’ effort to study Earth’s nearest neighbor from crust to core. NASA’s twin Grail spacecraft are slated to start circling the moon one day apart, with Grail-A arriving on Saturday (Dec. 31) and Grail-B following on Sunday (Jan. 1). The two probes will then fly around the moon in tandem, mapping the lunar gravity field in unprecedented detail and helping scientists better understand how the moon formed and evolved....

HIV vaccine recipients to be told their status The 3,000 participants in a recently halted trial of a failed HIV vaccine will be told which of them received the vaccine—found to be ineffective at best and possibly conferring an added risk—and which received a placebo, researchers announced this week. The decision to “unblind” the study comes a week after its co-organizers, drugmaker Merck & Co. and the federally sponsored HIV Vaccine Trials Network, got their first detailed look at how participants had fared....

Three decades ago researchers discovered what are essentially enormous saltwater lakes in the Atlantic Ocean. These “lakes,” called meddies, are gently spinning lenses of water up to 100 kilometers across and one kilometer thick. They float a few hundred meters below the surface of the ocean. Such large, warm bodies, which turned out to come from the Mediterranean Sea, should have an impact on heat exchange in the ocean—and on the planet’s climate....