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DENVER – Even as governments worldwide have largely failed to limit emissions of global warming gases, the decline of fossil fuel production may reduce those emissions significantly, experts said yesterday during a panel discussion at the Geological Society of America meeting. Conventional production of oil has been on a plateau since 2005, said James Murray, a professor of oceanography at the University of Washington, who chaired the panel. As production of conventional oil, which is far easier to get out of the ground, decreases, companies have turned to unconventional sources, such as those in deep water, tar sands or tight oil reserves, which have to be released by hydraulic fracturing....

An apple can kill, a sprinkle of sprouts can send you to the hospital and your succulent, pan-seared red snapper may actually be tilefish. Despite rising concerns about food safety and authenticity, contamination rates by salmonella, campylobacter, Escherichia coli and other common pathogens have not fallen or are actually on the increase, depending on the microbe, according to a 2013 report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Each year foodborne illnesses caused by these microorganisms sicken 48 million Americans, hospitalize 128,000 and kill 3,000, according to the agency....

CLIMATE AND HERESY Michael D. Lemonick’s “Climate Heretic” seems to suffer from a common misconception. Lemonick tends to avoid any distinction between skepticism and denial when referencing so-called climate skeptics. At the same time, he makes much of the rigidity so evident among some in the majority. Such portrayal does an injustice to serious proponents on all sides of the issue. To refer to all those in disagreement as “skeptics” implies that the vast majority of climate scientists then are credulous....

Climate is emerging as one of the focal points in this week’s infrastructure negotiations. President Biden is meeting today with Republican lawmakers led by West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who is pushing a roughly $600 billion counteroffer to Biden’s $2.2 trillion infrastructure proposal. The Capito proposal would all but eliminate clean energy and climate spending from the infrastructure package, and the White House’s eagerness to cut a deal has started to alarm some environmentalists....

THE VISUAL IMAGE is inherently ambiguous: an image of a person on the retina would be the same size for a dwarf seen from up close or a giant viewed from a distance. Perception is partly a matter of using certain assumptions about the world to resolve such ambiguities. We can use illusions to uncover what the brain’s hidden rules and assumptions are. In this column, we consider illusions of shading....

This topic comes by request on the Savvy Psychologist Facebook page from listener Anita M. of Detroit. Anita works with foster kids and, too often, sees disadvantaged kids who have been on a cocktail of psychiatric medications from as early as age 6. She asks, does such early use alter a child’s brain or body? And have the effects of lifelong psychiatric medication been studied? Childhood mental illness (and resulting medication) is equally overblown and under-recognized....

The heart relies on four valves that act as one-way gates, controlling blood flow out of each of the heart’s four chambers. The mitral valve between the two left chambers of the heart has two leaflets, or cusps; the tricuspid, pulmonary and aortic valves each have three. The leaflets swing open and shut like saloon doors with every beat, maintaining a steady blood supply. (A person’s heart generally beats 80 million times a year and five to six billion times over the course of a normal lifetime, according to Irvine, Calif....

For 33 years, Barbara Katz has enjoyed sitting with her husband and gazing into the backyard of their hilltop home, located in an area of historic houses in north Baltimore. She loves the neighborhood for its quiet charm and takes pleasure in the numerous foxes, birds and deer that roam outside her window. Then, last month, she found a notice in her mailbox that threatened to change all that: The neighbors wanted to put in an array of solar panels just beyond her back fence....

In about a month, two Swiss pilots will attempt a record-setting flight around the world without using any fuel, and today (Jan. 20), they announced the route for their ambitious journey aboard their solar-powered plane, Solar Impulse 2. Pilots André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard will begin their slow-and-steady voyage from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates in late February or early March. They’ll stop in Muscat, Oman; the Indian cities Ahmedabad and Varanasi; Mandalay, Myanmar; and the Chinese cities Chongqing and Nanjing, according to the official route....

PORT ELIZABETH South Africa (Reuters) - South Africa plans to spend $2.2 billion over two years to buy HIV/AIDS drugs for public hospitals, a government minister said on Monday, as a study shows the prevalence of the virus is rising. Speaking at a manufacturing plant of drugmaker Aspen Pharmacare, Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies said the government aims to buy three quarters of the drugs from local manufacturers. “We are on the cusp of a very important tender worth 24 billion rand ($2....

In the midst of rapidly rising case counts and hospitalizations during the COVID-19 pandemic, a small but incredibly loud segment of U.S. society has adamantly refused to wear masks. Many of them are men, who seem to view masks as emasculating face condoms that must be rejected. For example, a look at Donald Trump’s debacle of a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20, shows that men in his base, like Trump himself, avoid wearing masks....

The brain usually has a pretty good idea of what is part of the body and what is not—although the classic rubber hand illusion can convince people to adopt a fake hand as their own when one of their real hands is hidden from view. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have added a strange new twist to this experiment, persuading volunteers to believe that they have three hands rather than two....

By Antonio De la Jara and Rosalba O’Brien SANTIAGO, March 3 (Reuters) - Volcano Villarrica in southern Chile erupted in the early hours of Tuesday, sending a plume of ash and lava high into the sky, and forcing the evacuation of nearby communities. The volcano, located near the popular tourist resort of Pucon around 750 km (460 miles) south of the capital Santiago, is one of South America’s most active. It last erupted in 2000....

A team of U.S. and German scientists is developing detectors that could remove some of the mysteries—and hazards—of using large lithium-ion batteries to power vehicles and store renewable energy. The solution they see will rely on ultrasensitive new detectors, specialized magnetometers that can produce an image of the magnetic field of a given battery, revealing whether they have defects and showing exactly how much electric charge is left. The scientists have shed light on age-old questions about big batteries....

The immune system uses a special mechanism to protect children from novel viruses—and it typically saves them from a severe course of COVID-19 in two different ways. In the mucous membranes of their airways, it is much more active than that of adults. In children, this system reacts much faster to viruses that it has never encountered, such as pandemic pathogens. At least, that is what a recent study by Irina Lehmann of the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité and her colleagues suggests....

Nontoxic Nanotubes Nanoparticles could perform promising biomedical tasks, such as ferrying drugs to diseased cells or detecting genetic anomalies [see “Less Is More in Medicine”; SciAm, September 2001]. But researchers fret that these tiny tools could poison the body. A Stanford University team has done an experiment that may help allay those fears. The research­ers injected about 20 micrograms of single-walled carbon nanotubes into mice. The rodents showed no signs of ill effects or any deleterious accumulation of the nanotubes in organs....

In 2007, astronomers digging through archival data from six years prior, found a very strong, very brief burst of radio emission coming from an unidentified source in space. The detection, sometimes called the Lorimer burst after the lead astronomer on the project, was the first discovery of its kind. It introduced us to a new class of objects dubbed fast radio bursts or FRBs for short. “Fast” because these blips are very short—less than 5 milliseconds in duration....

In the past several weeks I’ve often wondered what Bruce McEwen would make of the current state of the world. McEwen was a neuroscientist and endocrinologist at the Rockefeller University who spent his career studying how stress impacts the brain. In 1968 he and his team made the seminal discovery that stress hormones such as cortisol enter the brain and effect neurological function. Exposure to chronic stress factors in the environment creates allostatic load, a term McEwen coined in 1993....

The benefits of sleep seem obvious. And yet scientists have long debated precisely how it improves brain performance at the cellular level. One camp argues that sleep reduces the unimportant connections between neurons, preventing brain overload. Another camp maintains that sleep consolidates memories from the previous day. A group of researchers recently tried to settle this debate by studying the larvae of a common see-through aquarium pet, the zebrafish. Like humans, zebrafish are active during the day and sleep at night....

Human activities added 1,430 gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere from 1870 to 2013. That’s 45 percent of the total carbon budget the world has to maintain a rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius. At this rate of emissions, the world will hit its carbon quota in the next three decades. The numbers were reported by the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of scientists who track the total accumulation of carbon annually, in a series of articles in the journals Nature Climate Change, Nature Geoscience and Earth System Science Data Discussions....