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California Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration yesterday released a plan to extend the state’s landmark cap-and-trade program in a bid to slash greenhouse gas emissions through midcentury. The California Air Resources Board (ARB) proposed amendments to the program yesterday evening that envision a carbon market through 2050 with increasing allowance prices, sending a signal to businesses that have been waiting to see if they should keep participating in the state’s quarterly auctions....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - There isn’t enough evidence yet to say for sure whether primary care doctors should offer routine vision screening to elderly people who don’t report any problems with their eyes, new U.S. guidelines conclude. When primary care physicians routinely screen adults over 65, it doesn’t appear to result in better outcomes than only testing patients with symptoms such as blurred or distorted vision, sensitivity to bright light or difficulty seeing in low light, the U....

What do an orgasm, a multiplication problem and a photo of a dead body have in common? Each induces a slight, irrepressible expansion of the pupils in our eyes. For more than a century scientists have known that our eyes’ pupils respond to more than changes in light. They also betray mental and emotional commotion. In fact, pupil dilation correlates with arousal so consistently that researchers use pupil size, or pupillometry, to investigate a wide range of psychological phenomena....

A Jain, a Sikh, a Muslim, a Buddhist and a Hindu walk into a room. What’s the punchline? There isn’t one, because this isn’t a joke. The room in question hosted a session at the Parliament of World Religions, in Salt Lake City, last month. It was a panel discussion about one of the most significant public health issues on the planet: the world toilet crisis, and how religious leaders can help to fight it....

Commercial fishermen in California and Oregon sued dozens of oil and gas companies yesterday for hurting the fishing market in the Pacific Ocean by raising temperatures on Earth. The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA) is seeking financial compensation for its losses from 30 companies, including oil and gas supermajors, according to the suit filed in a California state court. “It’s industry to industry, one harming another with the causal connection to prove it,” Noah Oppenheim, executive director of PCFFA, said in an interview....

Anyone who has ever seen a streaky line of vapor, known as a contrail, behind a high-flying aircraft knows that airplanes can produce their own clouds. But in rarer cases aircraft can also punch round holes or carve long channels through existing, natural clouds. Those hole-punch and canal clouds arise from the strong cooling effects of airflow past a plane’s propeller or over a jetliner’s wing, according to a new study....

Each degree of global warming will cut into harvests of the world’s staple crops, according to a new study that takes a broad view of the agricultural research field. Wheat, corn, rice and soybeans make up two-thirds of humans’ caloric intake. Each crop reacts differently to rising temperatures, and the effects vary from place to place. On average, though, the world can expect 3.1 to 7.4 percent less yield per degree Celsius of warming, according to the research....

Here’s another use for fracking: expanding access to hot rocks deep beneath Earth’s surface for energy production. In April Ormat Technologies hooked up the first such project—known in the lingo as an enhanced geothermal system, or EGS—to the nation’s electric grid near Reno, Nev. “The big prize is EGS,” enthuses Douglas Hollett, director of the Geothermal Technologies Office at the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE). “The key is learning how to do it in a reliable way, in a responsible way....

A coolant made from soybean oil and a more eco-friendly white paint are two winners of the 2013 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Awards announced this week. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency honored five innovative technologies that made important breakthroughs in becoming safer, cleaner and more sustainable. Over recent decades, industries have relied on many compounds and manufacturing techniques that are toxic, consume resources, or threaten the environment. The goal of green chemistry is to develop new technologies that are not only more environmentally friendly, but commercially viable....

The case count continues to climb as people contract a rare form of meningitis that produces strokelike symptoms. As of this posting, 14 patients have died and 156 others have fallen ill across 11 states. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have traced the unusual outbreak to three lots of steroid medication injected into the spine to treat pain. Meningitis is an infection of the membranes surrounding the spinal cord and brain....

Scientists have provided the first experimental evidence that rising carbon dioxide emissions are harming coral reefs in the wild. A team led by Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California, used an alkaline substance to alter the chemistry of seawater at a small atoll in the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s east coast. The resulting drop in seawater acidity mimicked pre-industrial ocean conditions. As a result, the rate at which coral reefs in the atoll grew increased by nearly 7% — suggesting that present-day CO2 emissions have slowed down coral growth by making seawater more acidic....

Comets are usually thought of as icy, dusty emissaries from the deepest reaches of the solar system. But according to a new simulation, many of them could have originated somewhere even more exotic—in budding planetary systems around other stars. Like most stars, the sun may very well have been created in a tightly nestled birth cluster, a stellar nursery with tens, hundreds or possibly even thousands of stars. During millions of years of intimate infancy, the newborn stars could have exchanged vast numbers of comets from the fringes of their disks, each of them winding up with an ensemble of hand-me-downs from their stellar siblings....

New Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System’s Innermost Planet A NASA spacecraft bolsters the case that ice lines the inside of polar craters on Mercury Martian Water Stuck in Minerals Significant amounts of water exist on Mars, sequestered within hydrated minerals and stored in the planet’s crust Mars Attacked: Planetary Scientists Vent Frustrations over Proposed Budget Cuts The field is bristling at cutbacks, proposed last month by the Obama administration, to planetary science and especially to NASA’s program of robotic Mars explorers...

By Laila Kearney (Reuters) - The Minneapolis parks system scored highest in the nation for the second straight year in a report ranking U.S. urban greenspace that was released on Thursday. The Midwestern city topped the Trust for Public Land’s third “ParkScore” survey, which ranks the quality of parks in the 60 largest U.S. cities. The trust looked at how many residents could reach a park quickly by foot, median park size, the percentage of total city area dedicated to parks, per capita spending, and the number of playgrounds available per 10,000 city residents....

Before Jonathan Kuniholm, a marine re­­serv­­ist, was shipped off to the war in Iraq, he and three friends formed a research and development firm they called Tackle Design. The four men had worked together in an industrial engineering class at North Carolina State University (N.C.S.U.), and, filled with youthful enthusiasm, they hoped their fledgling company could survive on jobs that were interesting and beneficial rather than simply moneymaking. They worked with inventors—making prototypes for a plastic lock to keep shoestrings tied and a fishing lure with an embedded LED—as well as with medical engineers from their alma mater, who were developing tools for minimally invasive robotic surgery....

As lawmakers divvied up billions of dollars last year to address the nation’s fiscal crisis via the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), they did not skimp on funding health. About one of every six and a half ARRA dollars went to programs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—the single largest allocation for any federal agency. Less than 1 percent of those monies, however, are going toward keeping people from getting sick in the first place....

Editor’s Note (1/18/22): On January 15 the eruption of a volcano near Tonga triggered a far-ranging tsunami. This story about detecting tsunamis created by earthquakes is being republished in light of this event. Buoys operate as today’s state-of-the-art tsunami-detection system. Seismic data can tell officials that an underwater earthquake has occurred, but strategically placed floating sensors often give the key warning if the earthquake has created a potentially devastating series of waves....

In the past two years the study of narcissism has gotten a face-lift. The trait is now considered to have two distinct dimensions: admiration seeking and rivalry. Subsequent studies, including a recent look at actors, revealed a more nuanced picture of personality than did past work. The actors, for instance, want admiration more than most people but tend to be less competitive than the average Joe—they may crave the spotlight, but they will not necessarily push others out of the way to get it....

In 2017, Traci Evans-Simmons could no longer avoid dialysis for her failing kidneys. She had lived with a condition known as glomerulonephritis, which was destroying her renal function, since her diagnosis 16 years earlier. For the last three years, nearly every night, she has hooked herself up to machines that take the place of her functioning kidneys. It was always going to be a temporary solution. Eventually, her nephrologist had cautioned, Evans-Simmons would need a transplant to have the best quality of life....

By Keith Coffman DENVER (Reuters) - Severe weather pounded eastern Colorado on Sunday, bringing heavy rain and spawning several tornados, one of which injured a man on a golf course near Denver, authorities said. A line of storms marched along a 130-mile (210 km) stretch of the Colorado Rockies’ front range and eastward onto the High Plains, said Frank Cooper, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Boulder, Colorado. He said the weather service had confirmed six twisters in all, most of which struck sparsely populated areas, with minimal damage reported....