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After four years of an agenda that favored polluters, a new day is dawning at the Department of the Interior. In March, communities across the country rejoiced in Secretary Deb Haaland’s historic confirmation to lead the biggest and most powerful land management agency in the country. Now, she’s taking the opportunity to pursue real reforms of the broken oil and gas leasing system that has prioritized fossil fuel CEOs for too long....

In an interview with Scientific American, Pauly addresses whether fisheries are doomed or if there is still hope for sustaining them. He speaks about how his early experiences working in Southeast Asia convinced him that fisheries sciencehad become a captive of the fishing industry, promoting industrial methods such as bottom trawling that devastated underwater ecosystems and threatened the livelihoods of small-scale artisanal fishers. Pauly is credited with helping to develop a new kind of science, one that pays more attention to the ocean’s ecology and what fish need to thrive....

By Natasha Gilbert of Nature magazineConservation organizations are looking for change. They are beginning to recognize that they have not met their founding goal of protecting nature from the effects of human activity. Earth’s land and water have been increasingly walled off as protected areas, but biodiversity continues to decrease around the world.Peter Kareiva, chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy (TNC), a prominent not-for-profit conservation group based in Arlington, Virginia, says people’s need for energy, food and economic development should be viewed as drivers of conservation activity, not anathema to it....

The symbiotic relation between science and science fiction is so tight that in some instances it is hard to tell which inspired the other—or whether both grew from the same seed. Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea stirred generations of submariners, and the U.S. Navy named its first nuclear sub, the USS Nautilus, in tribute to fictional Captain Nemo’s vessel, although Verne himself was enthused by the submarine that Robert Fulton designed for the French in 1800....

Gravitational waves may have just delivered the first sighting of a black hole devouring a neutron star. If confirmed, it would be the first evidence of the existence of such binary systems. The news comes just a day after astronomers had detected gravitational waves from a merger of two neutron stars for only the second time. At 15:22:17 UTC on April 26, the twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in the United States and the Virgo observatory in Italy reported a burst of waves of an unusual type....

There is nothing like a good night’s sleep to help you feel your best the next day. Now scientists are finding that good sleep habits may do more than restore cognitive function on a nightly basis—they may also fortify the brain over the long term, according to a new study in the Journal of Neuroscience. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison found that during sleep, activity ramps up in genes that are involved in producing oligodendrocytes—brain cells responsible for coating neurons with myelin....

When the novel coronavirus jumped to humans in late 2019—adapting so well to its new host species that it caused a pandemic—it was beating the odds. Although scientists estimate that roughly 60 percent of known human pathogens and up to 75 percent of those associated with emerging diseases originate in animals, successful “spillover” remains exceedingly rare. According to scholars, anywhere from 260,000 to more than 1.6 million animal viruses exist in nature....

The Y chromosome is often thought of as defining the male sex. Now scientists find that only two genes on the Y chromosome are needed in mice for them to father offspring. These findings could point to ways to help otherwise infertile men have children, the researchers said. Men with a condition called azoospermia, who cannot produce healthy sperms cells, could one day benefit from treatments based on these findings, they said....

Gazing at images of the great outdoors has been linked with a range of benefits, including pain relief, stress recovery and mood improvement. Now a study published in May 2014 in PLOS ONE adds impulse control to that list. Researchers at Utah State University asked three groups of participants to complete a task that tests whether they could resist instant gratification for a better reward later on. Before and during the task, the nature group viewed images of mountains, whereas the other groups looked at pictures of buildings or triangles....

Could some cases of schizophrenia boil down to something as simple as vitamin D deficiency? The idea was first put forth more than a decade ago by schizophrenia researcher John McGrath of the University of Queensland in Australia. The circumstantial evidence fit: people born in winter or spring or at high latitudes are at slightly increased risk of developing schizophrenia, and vitamin D deficiency is also more common in winter months and at high latitudes because of lack of sunlight....

T cells are the killers of the immune system, but like all good soldiers, they need experience before they can perform effectively. Indeed, T cells that have fought a particular infection before are much better than their inexperienced counterparts at clearing it from the body. This much scientists have long known. But new research suggests that there is more to the story. Researchers have discovered that some seemingly naive T cells are just as effective against infection as their experienced brethren....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). In 1847, Gabriel Lamé proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. Or so he thought. Lamé was a French mathematician who had made many important discoveries. In March of that year he sensed he’d made perhaps his biggest: an elegant proof of a problem that had rebuffed the most brilliant minds for more than 200 years. His method had been hiding in plain sight. Fermat’s Last Theorem, which states that there are no positive integer solutions to equations of the form an + bn= cn if n is greater than 2, had proved to be intractable....

Researchers published a paper yesterday outlining how they said the Trump administration misrepresented their work in its proposed rollback of Obama-era clean car rules. Their paper, published in the journal Science, spells out how the administration misapplied their findings to justify weakening some of President Obama’s most significant climate rules. “When this proposal came out, we were all shocked that we were all being cited so heavily,” University of Southern California researcher Antonio Bento said yesterday in a phone interview from Paris, where his team is presenting the paper....

Dave Hackenberg makes a living moving honeybees. Up and down the East Coast and often coast to coast, Hackenberg trucks his beehives from field to field to pollinate crops as diverse as Florida melons, Pennsylvania apples, Maine blueberries and California almonds. As he has done for the past 42 years, in the fall of 2006 Hackenberg migrated with his family and his bees from their central Pennsylvania summer home to their winter locale in central Florida....

As I type, I am in the cavernlike McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra is crooning through the speakers. People are bustling along with their bags, tucking into a sandwich before boarding for their flights and, of course, foolishly dropping their hard-earned money into the ringing, glowing slot machines. I’ve just come from giving a keynote at the Amaz!ng Meeting, the annual gathering of evidence-based thinkers run by the James Randi Educational Foundation....

Key Concepts Neuroscience Photoreceptor Afterimage Optical illusion Introduction Halloween is a time for sharing ghost stories and watching spooky movies. But have you ever thought about the science behind some of these uncanny experiences? Haunted houses, for example, take advantage of the way your brain uses sensory information. Often they include dim lighting and confusing sound effects to keep you disoriented and jittery, primed for fright. In this activity, you’ll create an optical illusion and learn that your eyes can play some eerie tricks on you—even in broad daylight....

On Sunday a capsule from the Stardust spacecraft became the fastest man-made object ever to return to Earth, clocking in at nearly 29,000 miles per hour before touching down in the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah. On Tuesday NASA scientists became the first humans ever to behold comet dust when they opened the capsule and peered at its interstellar contents. The team reported on their initial observations yesterday, launching several months of analysis by research groups worldwide....

Ah, the familiar grocery store guessing game: Which fish is the right one to buy? Farm raised or wild? Pacific or Atlantic? Yellowfin or albacore tuna? Is that swordfish laden with mercury? And what about the shark? It’s close to impossible to remember all the factors that go into making fish healthy and eco-friendly—or not—especially during a rushed trip to the supermarket or a business meeting over sushi. And although any given choice might seem insignificant, all those everyday purchases may have a big impact on the oceans in the long run, says Ken Peterson, spokesperson for the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California....

Evidence for the horrific impact of fishing gear on seabirds has been revealed by the closure of Canadian fisheries after fish stocks collapsed in the early 1990s. Biologists have long worried that diving birds can become entangled in gillnets, which are anchored in fixed positions at sea. Designed to snare fish by the gills, these nets can also trap and drown birds. This has been graphically demonstrated by finds of birds enmeshed in nets, but a quantitative assessment of the effects of such ‘by-catch’ on seabird populations has been hard to come by....

By Kate Kelland LONDON (Reuters) - More than 640 million people globally now weigh in as obese and the world has more overweight than underweight people, according to an analysis of global trends in body mass index (BMI). A startling increase in rates of obesity in the past 40 years means the number of people with a BMI of more than 30 has risen from 105 million in 1975 to 641 million in 2014, the study found....