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Since global climate negotiations began in the 1990s, United Nations delegates have accumulated an idiosyncratic cache of climate diplomacy gobbledygook. Euphemisms have been adopted to mollify specific nations. Acronyms are based on tongue-twisting verbiage from formal agreements. Here’s Climate Central’s guide to digesting the mumbo jumbo that’s being served up ahead of a key two-week round of climate talks in Paris, beginning today. What it means: At the end of every year, a session of the U....

Energy-efficiency gurus want to create the “Rosenfeld” as a simple unit of energy savings. It may not roll off the tongue like the ohm, watt or volt, but it would follow in their tradition. Many call Arthur Rosenfeld, a recently retired member of the California Energy Commission, the “godfather of energy efficiency.” One Rosenfeld would represent saving 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year—the same amount generated by a 500-megawatt coal-run power plant....

NASA’s Kepler observatory has spotted 20 planets that orbit cool, small stars—the largest such haul so far. These long-lived stars, known as K and M dwarfs, are ubiquitous in the Milky Way and could turn out to host numerous habitable planets. After the Kepler spacecraft experienced a mechanical failure in 2013 that made it impossible for it to keep observing its original targets, astronomers gave it a new mission, called K2....

Hardly Black and White In “The Social Psychology of Success,” by S. Alexander Haslam, Jessica Salvatore, Thomas Kessler and Stephen D. Reicher, it seems the authors’ bar graphs concerning blacks’ perceptions of inferiority are adding to problems inherent in group comparisons. The flat tops of the graphs on page 27 imply that all whites are smarter than all blacks. Each bar should actually be a compressed bell curve, showing that only a small percent of whites have superior intelligence and that many blacks are smarter than many whites....

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a growing cause of death worldwide. They killed roughly 1.27 million people in 2019, according to the most recent worldwide analysis. One obvious culprit has been our overuse of antimicrobial drugs, which pressures populations of bacteria to evolve better defenses against them. But antibiotic resistance also has a lesser-known source: heavy metals such as lead, mercury and silver. The metals are found all over because of human industries such as mining and transportation....

Key concepts Chemistry Solids Liquids Polymers Introduction Kinetic, or “magic,” sand is easy to find in stores, and fun to play with at home! But did you ever wonder what’s so magical about magic sand? You might not be surprised to hear the “magic” is actually science! You can create your own version of this fun mixture with just a few kitchen ingredients. Background Kinetic or magic sand is actually just regular sand with one important ingredient added: silicone oil....

Bite into a gooey candy bar, and what mouth sensations do you experience? Mmmm… chewy, sweet, creamy–with the signature, slightly bitter richness of chocolate as you close your mouth to swallow and the aroma wafts up into your nasal passages. Indeed, smell is an important component of flavor, as anyone with a severe head cold can testify. Flavor is a complex mixture of sensory input composed of taste (gustation), smell (olfaction) and the tactile sensation of food as it is being munched, a characteristic that food scientists often term mouthfeel....

It took 24 years for humankind to advance from the first powered flight in 1903 to Charles Lindbergh’s famous crossing of the Atlantic (and even less time for the U.S. space program to go from launching the first American astronaut into suborbital space to landing men on the moon). NASA officials are now hoping 25 years into the future is enough time for the nation’s aerospace engineers to come up with more ecofriendly airplanes....

Three books explore these innate human traits. What is morality? Where does it come from? According to neurophilosopher Patricia S. Churchland in her book Braintrust (Princeton University Press, 2011), morality originates in the brain. She argues that over time the human brain evolved to feel social pain and pleasure. As humans evolved to care about the well-being of others, they also developed a sense of morality. Robert Kurzban believes that we are all hypocrites....

During the candidate debates this month, one of the questions that television viewers will ask themselves is whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney has the right stuff—Does either man appear “presidential”? The two will communicate their answers, not just by anticipating and parrying their opponent’s critiques or demonstrating a grasp of policy and sensitivity to voter needs, but also via subtle gesturing before the camera and, perhaps most of all, through an unflinching coolness under pressure....

It is called “football crowd disorder” in the academic literature. On the street, it’s known simply as hooliganism. The melees at international soccer matches are infamous for the intensity of violence. Among the worst was the rioting that killed 39 fans at Belgium’s Heysel Stadium during a 1985 match between English and Italian clubs. To keep public order, many countries flood big games with police in full riot gear. But the hard-line display of uniforms, helmets and batons often has the opposite effect, acting as a spark that incites disturbances....

If we had not known the images were coming back from Titan, we might have guessed they were new pictures of Mars or Earth. Some people in the control room saw the California coast, some saw the French Riviera, and one person even said that Saturn’s biggest moon looked like his backyard in Tucson. For three weeks, the Huygens probe had coasted, dormant, after detaching from the Cassini spacecraft and being sent on its way to Titan....

By Matt Spetalnick and Michael Martina BEIJING (Reuters) - The United States and China announced a largely symbolic plan on Wednesday to implement new limits on carbon emissions, the highlight of a summit between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in which both leaders played down suggestions of differences and rivalry. U.S. officials said the commitments by the world’s two biggest carbon polluters came after months of backroom negotiations and would set the tone for a global climate control pact, but experts said the limits did not break significant new ground....

Look closely at the ingredients listed on the back of your M&Ms package and you’re sure to see Blue No. 2 there. Those versed in the chemistry of colorants will realize that’s the same chemical that’s in your blue jeans: indigotine. We now know that natural red dye comes from bugs, but what’s the story behind all the blue food we put into our mouths? The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved seven artificial colorings for food, including two blues: Blue No....

Half a century after Northwest Airlines Flight 4422 slammed into the side of 4,950-meter Mount Sanford in eastern Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains, killing all 30 men on board, commercial pilots Kevin McGregor and Marc Millican found the wreckage embedded in a glacier. After searching fruitlessly for the debris from the air, McGregor and Millican undertook several arduous treks on foot on the glacier. Watch this slide show to see some of the photos McGregor took during the climbs, and hear him talk about the quest to find the wreckage of NW 4422....

By Sharon BernsteinSACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown is expected to declare a drought emergency for the parched state on Friday, allowing him to seek federal help as the state faces its third dry winter in a row, according to a Democratic political source and local media.California has just completed what may turn out to be the driest year on record in many areas, leaving water reservoirs with a fraction of their normal reserves and slowing the normally full American River so dramatically that brush and dry riverbed are showing through in areas normally teeming with fish....

Gas leaks, garlic breath, skunks in the neighborhood—ah, the scent of thiols. The human nose is particularly sensitive to these sulfur-containing compounds, which is no surprise given that they are often associated with things to avoid. But how exactly are our nostrils (and those of other mammals) so adept at sniffing out thiols when other odors, such as bleach or vinegar, require higher thresholds of molecules in the air for us to detect them?...

Whether or not CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing can create superheroes as depicted on a new Netflix show, what it’s indisputably good at is this: editing a lot of genes really, really fast. In research published Tuesday in Cell Reports, scientists announced that they had used CRISPR/Cas9 to test gene after gene after gene in human immune system cells—45 genes in all, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes individually—to identify those that have anything to do with infection by theHIV virus, which causes AIDS when it infiltrates those T cells....

After typhoon Haiyan smashed into the Philippines on 8 November, an army of volunteers mobilized and worked around the clock to help guide relief efforts. But these were no boots on the ground. Instead, they were citizens from around the world who quickly analyzed satellite imagery and other data, generating maps to provide relief agencies with invaluable crowd-sourced information. Crowd-sourced disaster response, until a few years ago informal and often haphazard, is now getting more organized, and is being embraced by official humanitarian organizations and integrated into relief operations....

1,341 people dead in Nepal’s worst quake in 81 years Casualties pour into capital Kathmandu’s main hospital 7.9 magnitude quake topples historic Kathmandu tower Avalanche hits Mount Everest base camp, at least 10 dead Tremors kill 36 in India, 12 in China, four in Bangladesh (Adds new death toll, people sleeping in open) By Gopal Sharma and Ross Adkin KATHMANDU, April 25 (Reuters) - A powerful earthquake struck Nepal and sent tremors through northern India on Saturday, killing more than 1,300 people, touching off a deadly avalanche on Mount Everest and toppling a 19th-century tower in the capital Kathmandu....