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Planetary scientists have often puzzled over the origins of the Martian landscape, including its so-called hemispheric dichotomy, a pronounced difference in the thickness of the planet’s crust between its northern lowlands and highlands of the south. Another curious feature is an elevated region near the equator called the Tharsis Rise, capped by volcanic peaks located in a relatively straight line. A new study seeks to unify those features by showing how thickness variations in the planet’s outer layers may have given birth to the Tharsis Rise....

When it comes to tree cover loss, the spotlight usually rests on midlatitude hot spots like Brazil and Indonesia, where agriculture, logging and other development have threatened the existence of rainforests for years. But an analysis released today by a Washington, D.C.-based think tank reveals that people worried about the world’s forests may want to turn their attention north. According to new data from the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch initiative, Russia and Canada saw “massive” forest losses in 2013....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Microelectronics has transformed our lives. Cellphones, earbuds, pacemakers, defibrillators—all these and more rely on microelectronics’ very small electronic designs and components. Microelectronics has changed the way we collect, process and transmit information. Such devices, however, rarely provide access to our biological world; there are technical gaps. We can’t simply connect our cellphones to our skin and expect to gain health information....

The National Hockey League will significantly reduce its carbon footprint—as well as the greenhouse gas emissions of its 30 franchise teams—through improved energy conservation, detailed efficiency analyses and the purchase of renewable energy certificates (RECs) under a newly signed agreement with Constellation Energy Group, the league announced yesterday. The deal, which officials say brings the NHL to the fore among major sports leagues for its climate mitigation activities, will rely heavily on the use of Green-e Climate certified carbon offsets derived from wind energy and landfill gas-generated power, and RECs....

SEQUESTERING CO2 IN ROCKS “The Carbon Rocks of Oman,” by Douglas Fox, described efforts by geologist Peter Kelemen and other scientists to potentially sequester carbon dioxide in mantle rock formations. As a physical chemist who picked up the rudiments of geology and geochemistry during environmental investigations, I was intrigued by the article, which discussed various mechanisms that might be used to enhance the process or lower costs, including both in situ and ex situ concepts....

An extinct tree grows in India’s Kalakad-Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve. Well, it’s not exactly extinct. But the small, flowering tree species, known only as Wendlandia angustifolia, has had a long history of going unnoticed. Scientists collected the first specimen of the plant in 1867, then didn’t observe it again until 1917. After that no one officially saw it for another 81 years—possibly because the initial descriptions had placed it in the wrong location....

By Andrew M. Seaman (Reuters Health) - Reducing the number of beds in facilities for psychiatric patients is linked to an increase in prison populations, according to a new study. Prison population rose as the number of psychiatric beds decreased since 1990 among six South American countries, researchers found. “This is clearly not a definitive study that can’t provide cause and effect findings,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Adrian Mundt....

Psst. Have you heard the latest thing about him? And what she said about it? Chances are you’d be dying to know about that delectable tidbit of gossip offered by a confidant. We just can’t seem to get our fill of such morsels about other people in our social circles. Science tells us why: gossip is a kind of social grooming that helps our human networks hang together. We share news about friends and relatives, which solidifies our relationships with them....

Escherichia coli (E. coli) can give you a severe case of food poisoning or, with a little genetic engineering, a useful plastic. Scientists at San Diego–based Genomatica, Inc., have announced success in manipulating the bacteria to directly produce butanediol (BDO), a chemical compound used to make everything from spandex to car bumpers, thereby providing a more energy-efficient way of making it without oil or natural gas. “We have engineered the organism such that it has to secrete that product in order for it to grow,” says bioengineer Christophe Schilling, president and co-founder of the company, launched in 2000 to develop such chemical-producing microbes....

Emma MarrisWhich U.S. chemistry department is the biggest? As of autumn 2005, the University of California, Berkeley, had a whopping 406 graduate students. That must be some departmental picnic. Which ecology program takes the longest? The median time to complete a PhD degree in the ecology and evolutionary biology department at Tulane University in Louisiana is 8.5 years. Which genetics program has the highest average number of citations per faculty publication?...

When it comes to assigning blame for the current economic doldrums, the quants who build the complicated mathematic financial risk models, and the traders who rely on them, deserve their share of the blame. [See “A Formula For Economic Calamity” in the November 2011 issue]. But what if there were a way to come up with simpler models that perfectly reflected reality? And what if we had perfect financial data to plug into them?...

Africa is splitting in two. The reason: a geologic rift runs along the eastern side of the continent that one day, many millions of years in the future, will be replaced with an ocean. Scientists have argued for decades about what is causing this separation of tectonic plates. Geophysicists thought it was a superplume, a giant section of the earth’s mantle that carries heat from near the core up to the crust....

Last November the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa made the first ever attempt to land on an asteroid and collect a sample to bring back to Earth. Although it is not yet known whether the sampling was successful, the mission has provided scientists with an unprecedented close-up view of a near-Earth asteroid, detailed in several papers published today in the journal Science. The asteroid Itokawa is typical of the thousands of asteroids with Earth-crossing orbits....

Before becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 in late 2020, the woman, who was in her 60s, had been taking immune-suppressing drugs to treat a lymphoma relapse. The COVID-19 infection lingered for more than seven months, causing relatively mild symptoms, including fatigue and a cough. Sonnleitner, who is based at a microbiology facility in Außervillgraten, Austria, and her colleagues collected more than two dozen viral samples from the woman over time and found through genetic sequencing that it had picked up about 22 mutations (see ‘Tracking spike’s evolution’)....

Across two decades and thousands of pages of reports, the world’s most authoritative voice on climate science has consistently understated the rate and intensity of climate change and the danger those impacts represent, say a growing number of studies on the topic. This conservative bias, say some scientists, could have significant political implications, as reports from the group – the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – influence policy and planning decisions worldwide, from national governments down to local town councils....

A bedrock tenet of biogeography holds that organisms separated from their ancestral population will set off on their own evolutionary trajectory. Continental drift provides one such isolating mechanism, illustrated perhaps most spectacularly by the unique flora and fauna found on the island of Madagascar, which broke off from the southern supercontinent of Gondwana some 90 million years ago. Mountain upheaval and river formation can also divide populations. But a new study reveals that the barriers need not be physical....

WARSAW (Reuters) - Around 195 countries ended a two-week meeting in Warsaw on Saturday evening to agree the outlines of a deal meant to be agreed in 2015 to combat global warming.Following are some of the main decisions:FINANCEDeveloped nations promised in 2009 to increase their aid to poorer countries to help them cope with climate change to $100 billion a year after 2020, from $10 billion a year in 2010-12. But in Warsaw they rejected calls to set targets for 2013-19....

Automakers face a weighty choice: They can devote their energy to cars that use batteries, or they can make the gasoline engine superefficient. If they do the first, it will cost consumers more in the early going. If they do the second, it will cost less, but the car as we know it may have to radically change. Those are the choices the Obama administration sees, according to its most recent documents on fuel economy....

On December 24, 1862, a new theatrical adaptation of Charles Dickens’s fifth and last Christmas novella—his first being A Christmas Carol—premiered at the Royal Polytechnic Institution in London. In The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, an aging, gloomy, Scrooge-like chemistry teacher called Redlaw asks to have his memory erased. A ghostly doppelgänger grants him his wish but also curses anybody with whom he interacts to suffer the same fate. Theatergoers attending this particular performance were in for a shock: instead of confronting the usual flesh-and-bone actor with a sheet over his head, Redlaw faced an incorporeal entity that materialized onstage, apparently out of thin air....

The U.S. outspends all other industrial countries on health care, and yet we do not enjoy better health. Quite the opposite: an American baby born in 2006 can expect to live to 78—two years less than a baby born across the Canadian border. Out of the 30 major industrial countries, the U.S. ranks 28th in infant mortality. A large part of the gap in infant mortality can be traced to high infant death rates in certain populations—particularly African-Americans, who make up about 13 percent of the total population....