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The world’s carbon dioxide output hit a new record high last year and is poised to break that record in 2012, according to a new study. Global CO2 emissions grew 3 percent last year, and scientists with the Global Carbon Project estimate they will grow another 2.6 percent this year, to an estimated 35.6 billion metric tons. They expect the amount of CO2 emitted this year by burning fossil fuels to grow to 58 percent above the 1990 emissions level....

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - Authorities fighting Ebola must do more to tackle a high death rate among young children whose isolation from parents also causes great distress and deprives them of the extra care they need, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday. Reporting on a meeting of clinicians from Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, it said there was a consensus that the strict “no touch” policy for Ebola patients could be lifted if good measures are in place to protect health workers from infection....

(Credit:Tim Stevens/CNET)REDMOND, Wash. – Panos Panay and I stand on the third floor of Microsoft’s Studio B, an unassuming building easily missed amid the company’s sprawling Redmond campus. Panay, the Microsoft VP in charge of the Surface, looks a bit tired as he leans on a handrail and looks out across the inner courtyard of the building, the hub of Microsoft’s ever-expanding and increasingly impressive hardware efforts. Still, he’s visibly enthusiastic about the work he’s about to show me....

Think about the first time you met your college roommate. You were probably nervous, talking a little too loudly and laughing a little too heartily. What else does that memory bring to mind? The lunch you shared later? The dorm mates you met that night? Memories beget memories, and as soon as you think of one, you think of more. Now neuroscientists are starting to figure out why. When two events happen in short succession, they feel somehow linked to each other....

Americans spend some $200 billion annually on prescription drugs. Since 1997, in an effort to keep a lid on costs, 37 states have enacted legislation allowing patients, their families and health care facilities to recycle good, unused pills through local pharmacies for donation to patients lacking sufficient insurance. Thousands of patients could in principle benefit from these “drug repository” laws. But as well intentioned as these efforts are, practical problems have prevented widespread implementation of such programs....

(Credit:Primate Labs)The iPad Air is 80 percent faster than the fourth-generation iPad, say new benchmark tests.Running the new iPad through the paces via Geekbench 3 tests, Primate Labs found that the tablet comes close to reaching Apple’s promise of doubling the speed of the iPad 4.The iPad Air is powered by an A7 processor, just like the iPhone 5S. But the new iPad runs at 1.4GHz – which is 100MHz faster than the 5S, Primate Labs founder John Poole said on Wednesday....

When wandering through a hunter’s market in Laos, Robert Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society happened upon a previously unknown rodent. Called kha-nyou by locals–or rock rat–the long-whiskered and furry-tailed rodent was reputed to favor certain limestone terrain. Western scientists named it Laonastes aenigmamus or stone-dwelling enigmatic mouse–partially because a live specimen has never been collected–and thought the rock rat represented a new family of mammals. But new research reported in today’s Science proves that Laonastes actually represents a fossil come to life....

Moths’ drab gray and brown coats may not capture our imaginations as much as their colorful butterfly cousins do, but according to a recent study, that’s more a failure of human eyesight than of moths themselves. By photographing the wing scales of 82 moths from 26 different species using a camera that captures an extra wide spectrum of light, researchers viewed the insects in the infrared: wavelengths of light too long for humans to see....

A surface coated in spiky polymer molecules destroys the flu virus at a touch, according to a new report. The experimental substance, which can be applied like paint, might complement other germ control methods used in public spaces such as hospitals and airplanes, the developers say. Some experts, however, dispute its potential value for taming flu. Chemist Alexander Klibanov of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his colleagues had already found that the bristly coating of polymers kills bacteria including Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus, which can lie in wait on doorknobs or other surfaces for unsuspecting hands to pick up....

University of Washington researcher Rajesh Rao, left, plays a computer game with his mind, while across campus, researcher Andrea Stocco wears a magnetic stimulation coil over the left motor cortex region of his brain. (Credit: University of Washington) The telepathic cyborg lives, sort of. University of Washington scientists Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco claim that they are the first to demonstrate human brain-to-brain communication. Rao sent a signal into a Stocco’s brain via the Internet that caused him to move his right hand....

Texas Health authorities reported early this morning that a second Dallas nurse from Texas Presbyterian Hospital has tested postive for Ebola. The woman presumably was infected while caring for Thomas Eric Duncan, the first person to becme sick with Ebola while in the United States. Confirmation tests are being performed at the Centers for Disease Control. The news further highlights how little margin there is for error when treating an Ebola patient and strongly suggests that health care workers were not adequately trained to handle Ebola cases at the hospital....

When humans live together, they work together—whether they are building cities or just trying to snag some grub for dinner. But if you can still reap the benefits of contributions to the greater good without lifting a finger yourself, why would you not choose that option? Chances are you tow the line out of fear of being punished. “The problem with punishment—why it’s an interesting question for evolutionary biologists and anthropologists—is [that] it’s not clear how this behavior would evolve,” says Christoph Hauert, a research associate in evolutionary dynamics at Harvard University and lead author of a study on punishment in the new issue of Science....

Every night in the open ocean zooplankton migrate toward the surface, away from their deepwater daytime habitat. They are followed by a large and diverse community of fish and invertebrates in what is called “diel vertical migration.” By scuba diving in the open ocean at night, so-called “blackwater divers” are some of the few people on Earth who get to see these weird and wonderful animals up close. “Blackwater diving really speaks to scuba divers that have seen most of what the reefs and wrecks have to offer and want to experience something completely different—a drifting, night dive miles away from shore in an environment where you will never see the bottom,” says Hawaii-based ecologist and underwater photographer Jeff Milisen....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Sen. John McCain withstood beatings and torture as a prisoner of war, but he was confronted with an enemy in July 2017 that he was ultimately unable to overcome. An aggressive and deadly brain cancer known as glioblastoma, or GBM, took McCain’s life on Aug. 25, 2018. The man noted for his unstoppable resilience, pervasive optimism and uncompromising personal ethos was not able to conjoin forces with the marvels of modern medicine and defeat the insidious enemy of brain cancer....

These 9,000-year-old bones may be evidence of the oldest known case of ritual beheading in the New World, raising new questions as to how this grisly practice began in the Americas, the researchers said in a new study. “Few Amerindian habits impressed the European colonizers more than the taking and displaying of human body parts, especially when decapitation was involved,” said study lead author André Strauss, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany....

Isabella Rossellini, well known as a supermodel and movie star, is now making short films for mobile devices that illustrate the sex lives of dragonflies, earthworms and other creatures. But they are not like standard nature shows. In these films, which she researched with the help of Wildlife Conservation Society experts, she not only details unusual aspects of the critters’ biology but also dresses up as them and mimics sex with paper cutouts....

More than a third of the world already suffers from shortages of potable water—with a rise to 50 percent expected by 2025. Desalination of seawater can help coastal communities can address local shortfalls, although the process is costly, and releasing leftover brine back to the ocean has environmental implications. Now a new system promises to produce more drinkable water with less salty effluent. Kamalesh Sirkar, a New Jersey Institute of Technology (N....

A newly compiled comprehensive record of Earths atmospheric oxygen shows a large peak 50 million years ago. The abundance of oxygen, which came on the heels of the dinosaur decline, could have fueled not only the evolution of giant, placental mammals such as the 10-foot sloth but also large-brained creatures, including humans. The data come from deep-sea sediment cores dating to 205 million years ago that contain inorganic carbon-rich minerals as well as the organic remains of single celled marine phytoplankton....

A few months ago at the Paris climate talks, President Barack Obama and a panoply of world leaders talked at length about the importance of reducing carbon dioxide pollution associated with burning coal, the largest source of greenhouse gases. So far there is only one way to do that without pulling the plug on coal altogether: carbon capture and storage (CCS), a process by which CO2 is pulled from a smokestack before it escapes into the air and is then buried deep underground....

By Laila Kearney (Reuters) - Fierce solar blasts that could have badly damaged electrical grids and disabled satellites in space narrowly missed Earth in 2012, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The bursts would have wreaked havoc on the Earth’s magnetic field, matching the severity of the 1859 Carrington event, the largest solar magnetic storm ever reported on the planet. That blast knocked out the telegraph system across the United States, according to University of California, Berkeley research physicist Janet Luhmann....