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Smartphones and GPS-based navigation systems have made it pretty easy for humans to figure out how to get from point A to point B. But migratory animals lack not only the thumbs to key in search terms for a destination on an iPhone, but the technology itself. Migratory birds and sea turtles, however, may have something better: They can sense variations in Earth’s magnetic field as they travel huge distances across the globe to the same mating grounds or beaches year after year....

An internationally recognized water and climate change expert admitted yesterday that he lied about his identity to obtain internal funding and strategy documents from the Heartland Institute. Writing in The Huffington Post, Pacific Institute President Peter H. Gleick apologized and called his actions “a serious lapse of my own professional ethics and judgment.” But he also said his decision to fraudulently acquire and then leak a set of explosive documents from the conservative, climate skeptic think tank was prompted by sustained attacks from climate deniers....

Since its debut nearly two decades ago, Electronic Arts’s (EA) SimCity has allowed its players to become the masters of their own mini-domains. But there was always a nagging feeling that the game judged their moves based on some preset moral compass. No more: in the new version of the game SimCity Societies, set to hit stores on November 15, zoning and infrastructure planning requirements designed to keep city planners on the right track have been replaced with a much broader definition of success....

New study results bolster the controversial hypothesis that certain cases of obesity are contagious. Over the last 20 years, some research has suggested that certain strains of human and avian adenoviruses–responsible for ailments ranging from the chest colds to pink eye–actually make individuals build up more fat cells. Having antibodies to one strain in particular, so-called Ad-36, proved to correlate with the heaviest obese people, and in one study, pairs of twins differed in heft depending on exposure to that virus....

More than a decade ago a group of New York City residents launched an ambitious experiment to build a park atop an expanse of abandoned elevated freight train tracks. Today the High Line, which opened in 2009, provides locals, commuters and tourists with more than a kilometer of green space several meters above the urban bustle below. Emboldened by the project’s success, a team of designers and engineers has proposed the polar opposite idea: transform a deserted underground trolley depot into a haven for leisurely recreation....

A tool that allows US regulators to assess drug safety from the health records of more than 175 million people is set to become an integral part of the nation’s drug-safety surveillance. On 1 October, a $116-million pilot that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been running since 2009 will become a fully fledged initiative to mine the electronic medical data held by insurers and healthcare providers for signs that a medicine has harmful side effects....

Full question: How come some similar animals are different species, while with domestic dogs, wildly dissimilar types are considered different breeds? – Z. Kornberg, Jerusalem Michael Bruford, a professor of biological sciences at Cardiff University in Wales, explains the thought process behind this seeming double standard. Scientists have been distinguishing between species on the basis of how they look, behave or live since recorded history began. However, two famous scientists stand out in terms of how we perceive species differences today: Carl Linnaeus, an 18th-century Swedish naturalist, and Charles Darwin....

Europe’s long-awaited ExoMars rover—the first ever for the continent—seems to be cursed. Parachute problems scuppered its initially planned launch in 2018. Then the coronavirus pandemic prevented a launch in 2020. And now Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has dashed chances for a liftoff in 2022. For members of the team hoping “the third time’s the charm,” this latest delay feels especially cruel. “It was impossible for me to speak about this mission for weeks without tears,” says Valérie Ciarletti of the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Environments, Space Observations (LATMOS) in France, who leads the rover’s subsurface radar instrument team....

As Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Space is big…. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” We and many other astronomers have dedicated our careers to creating maps of the universe on the largest scales possible—to discovering just how big the cosmos really is and how it works. The maps we create are crucial for studying the physics that drives cosmic history....

An astronomer recently made an unexpected discovery — not in the skies, but in a tea-kitchen at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Tucked away in the basement room of the Danish capital were cartons holding hundreds of glass plates imprinted with images of telescope observations, some of which are 120 years old. The images present a striking record of historic solar and lunar eclipses, comets, and even views of binary stars and distant constellations....

For children with autism, a dose of oxytocin — the so-called “love hormone” — seems to fine-tune the activity in brain areas linked to social interactions, according to a new study. Although the hormone didn’t change children’s social skills in the study, its boosting effect on the brain’s social areas suggests that using oxytocin nasal sprays immediately before behavioral therapies could boost the effects of those treatments, the researchers said....

Global freshwater resources are threatened by rising demands from many quarters. Growing populations need ever more water for drinking, hygiene, sanitation, food production and industry. Climate change, meanwhile, is expected to contribute to droughts. Policymakers need to figure out how to supply water without degrading the natural ecosystems that provide it. Existing low-tech approaches can help prevent scarcity, as can ways to boost supplies, such as improved methods to desalinate water....

The Antarctic ice sheet lost a whopping 3 trillion tons of ice between 1992 and 2017, scientists announced this week. That’s the equivalent of about 8 millimeters of sea-level rise. It might sound small, but scientists say the significance is huge. Most alarmingly, the losses are speeding up. Since 1992, annual ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula has more than doubled, and it’s tripled in West Antarctica. Much of that increase has occurred in the last five years alone....

A small, feathered dinosaur that probably sported bat-like wing membranes might have been able to glide or fly short distances. The fossilized remains of the creature, unearthed in eastern China and described today in Nature, have a 13-centimetre-long, rod-like bone that extends from each wrist, which might have helped to support or position wing membranes; small patches of membranous tissue also cling around the bones. It is the first time such a bone structure has been seen in dinosaurs....

In 2013, geneticist Stephen Elledge answered a question that had puzzled cancer researchers for nearly 100 years. In 1914, German biologist Theodor Boveri suggested that the abnormal number of chromosomes — called aneuploidy — seen in cancers might drive the growth of tumours. For most of the next century, researchers made little progress on the matter. They knew that cancers often have extra or missing chromosomes or pieces of chromosomes, but they did not know whether this was important or simply a by-product of tumour growth — and they had no way of finding out....

Doctors at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital could not figure out what was wrong with the 29-year-old man sitting before them. An otherwise healthy construction worker from Nicaragua, the patient was suffering from a splitting headache, double vision and ringing in his ears. Part of his face was also numb. The cause could have been anything—from an infection to a stroke, a tumor or some kind of autoimmune disease. The Emergency Department (ED) staff took a magnetic resonance imaging scan of the man’s brain, performed a spinal tap and completed a series of other tests that did not turn up any obvious reason for the swelling in his brain—a condition that is formally known as encephalitis....

By Sharon BernsteinSACRAMENTO, California (Reuters) - California pledged on Monday to restore 80,000 acres of the depleted Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta as part of a massive project to send fresh water from mountain streams in the north to farmers and residents in the parched south.The $16 billion plan was released as the state struggles in what appears to be shaping up as its driest year on record, with some farmers and urban water districts promised just 5 percent of the water that they had requested for next year....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Former environment minister Owen Paterson has called for the UK to scrap its climate change targets. In a speech to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, he cited “considerable uncertainty” over the impact of carbon emissions on global warming, a line that was displayed prominently in coverage by the Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Paterson is far from alone: climate change debate has been suffused with appeals to “uncertainty” to delay policy action....

People can smell thousands—perhaps even millions—of different scents. Yet scientists know that in the nose, there are only about 400 different types of odor receptors—proteins that capture scented molecules so that smells can be identified. Thus, there isn’t, obviously, one type of receptor that responds to a rose, while another jumps for jasmine. So how can we smell so much, with so few types of receptors? The answer is that cells mix and match....

In a large apartment building, it’s impossible to avoid the neighbors. You can hear the Bruce Springsteen that the tenant in 7B cranks while vacuuming, the kids in 8A directly above tromping around, and if someone decides to paint, the fumes reach everyone on the floor. So when a building supervisor notified owners in a sixty-unit co-op building in Brooklyn that one of the apartments had a bedbug infestation, Eddie Rosenthal feared that it was only a matter of time until the bugs spread to his home....