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Farmers and farm groups have usually been opposed to government climate policies. A new study finds they are not so much skeptics of climate change as they are about the rules that may come with them and how they might harm their business. A group of researchers at the University of California, Davis, surveyed 162 farmers in Yolo County, Calif., comparing what growers thought about climate change, their willingness to participate in government-led climate programs and their takes on four different environmental regulations passed in the last 25 years....

Global health hit the philanthropic jackpot in recent years. About four times more aid flowed into developing countries in 2007 than in 1990. But a paper published in The Lancet suggests the nearly $22 billion donated in 2007 missed many of the world’s most deserving countries and diseases. “We know there’s a lot of money,” says Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and co-author of the study that tracked both the sources and destinations of aid....

Cornstarch mixed with a little water is peculiar stuff. At first glance it seems like any other liquid—you can pour it from one bowl to another or dip your hands in it. But give it a squeeze or strike the surface of the fluid with a hard blow, and the cornstarch slurry suddenly firms up—you can roll it into balls, walk on it and even bounce on it. Vigorously stirring the mixture will also turn it nearly to stone....

Imagine a Naval gun so powerful it can shoot a 5-inch projectile up to 220 miles, yet requires no explosives to fire. That’s the Navy’s futuristic electromagnetic railgun, a project that could be deployed on the service’s ships by 2025, and which is now a little bit closer to reality with the signing of a deal with Raytheon for the development of what’s known as the pulse-forming network. Rather than using explosives to fire projectiles as do conventional naval weapons, the railgun depends on an electromagnetic system that uses the ship’s onboard electrical power grid to fire the gun....

A spectacular view of Mount Everest was not what most stunned Hokkaido University geoscientist Evgeny A. Podolskiy during his first trip to the Himalayas in October 2017. What shocked him while working and living in the area were the loud, reverberating booms every night. “The ice was cracking up,” says Podolskiy, who has done research in several other glacier environments around the world, including Greenland and the Alps. “I’ve never come across anything like this before....

One of the first things neuroscience students learn is that the brain’s right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, and vice versa. Brain-computer interfaces, which employ brain signals to control an external device such as a robotic arm or a wheelchair, also utilize these opposing-side signals. Such technology is therefore unable to help victims of stroke and brain trauma, who often have one seriously damaged hemisphere that cannot be enlisted for motor commands....

KGI Securities has offered a veritable data dump of speculation on upcoming Apple products, including a higher-resolution iPad, a low-cost iMac, and an iPad Mini Retina. Pixel-packing iPad 6: Forget the iPad 5 – KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is talking iPad 6. He anticipates a 9.7-inch iPad with a pixel density that exceeds today’s iPad by 30 percent to 40 percent, as reported Saturday by MacRumors and other Apple blogs....

Many of the people dying in the novel coronavirus pandemic appear to be harmed more by their own immune system than by the virus itself. The infection can trigger a cytokine storm—a surge in cell-signaling proteins that prompt inflammation—that hits the lungs, attacking tissues and potentially resulting in organ failure and death. But this phenomenon is not unique to COVID-19; it sometimes occurs in severe influenza, too. Now a study sheds light on one of the metabolic mechanisms that help orchestrate such runaway inflammation....

The increasing success of in vitro fertilization (IVF) has come mainly from advances in the way doctors grow and select embryos. When transferred into a woman’s womb, however, only a minority of these embryos implant in the lining of the uterus, also known as the endometrium. “The reason,” says Steven L. Young, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “lies primarily with an inability to evaluate if the endometrium is ready for the embryo....

The two empty cars sit idling, side by side. Jim and Buzz each get into their vehicles, close the doors and push their gas pedals to the floor, racing headlong toward the edge of a cliff. The canyon below comes into view–they should each leap from their driver’s seats before their cars vault into the abyss, but the first one to bail out loses. At the last possible moment Jim throws open his door and dives out onto the ground....

Mercury exposure in the United States increases with age, then starts tapering off when people turn 50, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found in a study released today. The CDC study is the first to measure mercury exposure in a wider U.S. population, following research that focused on young children and women in their childbearing years. People are often exposed to mercury through contaminated seafood, and a recent U....

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is what might be called a satellite for the information age. It is designed to provide scientists who study the sun with a torrent of data—the space agency says the observatory will return 150 million bits of data about Earth’s host star per second, or about 1.5 terabytes per day. The spacecraft, known as SDO, is scheduled to launch into orbit at 10:26 A.M. Wednesday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, weather permitting....

Billions of people lack access to clean water for all or part of the year or must travel far to collect it. Extracting water directly from the air would be an immeasurable boon for them. But existing technologies generally require a high-moisture climate and a lot of electricity, which is costly and often unavailable. This problem is now becoming more tractable, thanks to robust systems in development that rely on readily available energy from the sun....

By early August, scientists will have pumped 1,000 tons of pure carbon dioxide into porous rock far below the northwestern United States. The goal is to find a permanent home for the carbon dioxide generated by human activities. Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, began the injections into the Columbia River Basalt formation near the town of Wallula on 17 July. The rock contains pores created as many as 16 million years ago, when magma flowed across what is now the Columbia River Basin....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. It has become fashionable to bad-mouth big data. In recent weeks the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired and other outlets have all run pieces bashing this new technological movement. To be fair, many of the critiques have a point: There has been a lot of hype about big data and it is important not to inflate our expectations about what it can do....

Earth’s moon looms. Fifty years after humans first set foot on the lunar surface, multiple nations and for-profit private companies are racing to go back. For those hoping to put more people on the moon, many plans for future lunar missions hinge on harvesting available resources there. And the most resource-rich target seems to be the moon’s poles, where permanently shadowed craters act as “cold traps,” building up deposits of water ice from billions of years of comet and asteroid impacts—and also a possible active “water cycle” on the moon....

Dear EarthTalk: The term “sustainable communities” gets bantered around quite a bit today. Could you define it for me?—Holly Parker, Mechanicsburg, Pa. Kaid Benfield, Sustainable Communities program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), uses the term “sustainable communities” to describe places “where use of resources and emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants are going down, not up; where the air and waterways are accessible and clean; where land is used efficiently and shared parks and public spaces are plentiful and easily visited; where people of different ages, income levels and cultural backgrounds share equally in environmental, social and cultural benefits; where many needs of daily life can be met within a 20-minute walk and all may be met within a 20-minute transit ride; where industry and economic opportunity emphasize healthy, environmentally sound practices....

Questions answered in this episode: “Let’s say I’m an alien on a ship 65 million or more light-years away. Using a telescope, I look at Earth and I see dinosaurs living their daily lives. If my ship started travelling towards earth near the speed of light. Would I see the dinosaurs moving faster–fast-forwarded?"—sl270703 “If all movement is relative, how can there be a speed limit? In order to measure speed, you have to measure it against something....

No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History by Dane Huckelbridge. William Morrow, 2019 ($26.99) Sometime around the beginning of the 20th century, a Bengal tiger emerged regularly out of the forests of the Himalayan foothills to stalk its preferred prey: humans. This tiger came to be known as the Man-Eater of Champawat and, over the course of a decade, killed an estimated 436 people—highly unusual and terrifying behavior for its kind....

The number of people born left-handed plummeted temporarily around the turn of last century, according to recently released documentary footage of factory workers in northern England between 1900 and 1906. Researchers recorded the number of people waving to the camera with their right or left hand—a proxy for handedness—and compared the results for different age groups. They report in Current Biology that the rate of left-handedness plunged from an estimated 20 percent of children born around 1840 to a mere 3 percent of those born 50 years later....