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OSLO (Reuters) - Total greenhouse gas emissions by China and other emerging nations since 1850 will surpass those of rich nations this decade, complicating U.N. talks about who is most to blame for global warming, a study showed on Thursday.Developing nations accounted for 48 percent of cumulative emissions from 1850 to 2010, according to the study by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, research group Ecofys and the European Commission’s Joint Research Center....

Scientists pride themselves on their objectivity, yet when it comes to gender and race, they are as partial as everyone else. A 1999 study, for example, found that academic psychologists were more likely to recommend hiring a male job applicant than a female one with an identical record. A résumé assigned the name Brad Baker is more likely to lead to a job interview than one from Rasheed Jones. Numerous studies have shown that women scientists get weaker letters of recommendation....

By Laura Zuckerman (Reuters) - Conservation groups on Friday hailed a court decision that blocks Montana from building roads and logging in nearly 37,000 acres of a state forest that serves as core habitat for protected grizzly bears. A federal judge ruled on Thursday that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Endangered Species Act by issuing a permit to Montana allowing it to open the Stillwater State Forest to timber harvests in areas that would damage grizzly territory....

The Keystone XL Pipeline would move enough tar sands oil to result in another 181 million metric tons of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere yearly. A new report prepared by environmental group Oil Change International (OCI) analyzes what the climate change impacts of the proposed pipeline might be. Consultants hired by the U.S. State Department determined that completing the Keystone XL Pipeline that would transport tar sands from Canada to Texas would have no impact on greenhouse gas emissions, largely because they assumed that the tar sands oil would flow regardless....

On the street it’s called skunk for its intense, pungent odor. But the smell isn’t the only thing that’s strong about this type of marijuana. These increasingly popular strains contain high levels of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive substance in cannabis that causes its euphoric effects. Several new studies have noted the rapid rise in marijuana potency and raised questions about the risks it poses to users. According to a recent analysis presented at the 2015 Meeting of the American Chemical Society, the amount of THC in samples from marijuana sold in Colorado are reaching 30 percent....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It has been a busy few weeks. The last scientific experiments in support of forthcoming results. The final, detailed command sequences uploaded to Rosetta. Hotels and flights booked. As each successive journalist asks “Are you nervous about the landing?”, the level of trepidation rises. This morning, I couldn’t eat breakfast. Just coffee....

A compound produced by a simple soil microbe may prove a new and extremely effective antibiotic. In recent decades, strains of Staphylococcus aureus and various Enterococcus bacteria have shown resistance to the most powerful antibiotics in the modern medical arsenal. The new compound has wiped out the two superbugs in vitro and in mice. Jun Wang of Merck Research Laboratories and his colleagues tested 250,000 compounds extracted from microorganisms for antibiotic properties....

The African nation of Rwanda recently set a goal of circumcising an estimated two million adult men by the end of 2012 to fight the spread of HIV, and is investigating a new nonsurgical device that is said to allow practitioners to perform the procedure in less than four minutes—without anesthesia. The patent pending PrePex device includes an elastic mechanism that fits around an inner ring, trapping the penis foreskin—the loose fold of skin that covers its glans—which cuts its blood supply....

MONTREAL—A good night’s sleep, or even just a nap, can be an aid to memory. Psychologists have known for years that sleep solidifies what we’ve learned during the day, transforming tenuous associations into stable ones. Learning while you snooze seems supremely efficient, and so people have long dreamed of co-opting this process so that their dozing brain shores up what matters to them—say, material they’ve studied for a test or a talk, or verbiage in a foreign language they want to master....

Climate models suggest that forest fires drive global warming by releasing greenhouse gases. The resulting climate change then lengthens the forest fire season and increases the number of fires each year, thereby pumping more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and further exacerbating atmospheric warming. But a new study says that despite emitting heat-trapping methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, fires in temperate zone (or boreal) forests may actually cool the climate significantly, because they leave behind a landscape that reflects sunlight....

Unsigned and undated, inventory number 779 hangs behind thick glass in the Louvre’s brilliantly lit Salle des États. A few minutes after the stroke of nine each morning, except for Tuesdays when the museum remains closed, Parisians and tourists, art lovers and curiosity seekers begin flooding into the room. As their hushed voices blend into a steady hivelike hum, some crane for the best view; others stretch their arms urgently upward, clicking cell-phone cameras....

The Bluestone River that straddles the Virginia-West Virginia border has long been a popular trout-fishing spot, as well as a source of drinking water for nearby towns. So Virginia environmental officials were stunned when routine sampling turned up something disturbing: Carp in the river were loaded with industrial compounds called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Seeking to unravel the mystery, they followed the river all the way up to the entrance of a rural cave in West Virginia....

President Obama responded to Japan’s nuclear reactor crisis yesterday by asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make a comprehensive safety review of U.S. nuclear plants to assess their ability to withstand natural calamities. Speaking at the White House, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said yesterday the study would be made. He repeated his statements this week that the commission considered the 104 U.S. nuclear plants to be secure, but the evidence from Japan’s devastating reactor damage would be the basis for a new review....

A cave in the northern Caucasus Mountains may hold a key to the long-standing mystery of why the Neandertals, our closest relatives, went extinct. For nearly 300,000 years the heavy-browed, barrel-chested Neandertals presided over Eurasia, weathering glacial conditions more severe than any our own kind has ever faced. Then, starting around 40,000 years ago, their numbers began to decline. Shortly after 28,000 years ago, they were gone. Paleo­anthropologists have been debating whether competition with incoming modern humans or the onset of rapidly oscillating climate was to blame for their demise....

On holidays, it’s natural to feel a longing for times gone by—a childhood spent singing carols or meals spent with now departed loved ones. Recently scientists have explored the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia, finding that it serves a positive function, improving mood and possibly mental health. A new paper illuminates why it works, finding that this sepia-toned sentiment does not cement us in the past but actually raises our spirit and vitality....

The global temperature was 1.3°F above the 20th century average in June according to data released on Monday by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). That bests the previous hottest June record, set in 1998, by 0.05°F. June was the 352nd consecutive month in a row with temperatures that were above the global average. The last cooler-than-average month was February 1985, the month of “Careless Whisperer.” The June hot streak extends back even further, with the last cool June coming in 1976 when people were grooving to Wings’ chart topper, “Silly Love Songs....

FINALIST YEAR: 1956 HER FINALIST PROJECT: Building a long telescope in a short tube WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Like many precocious kids, Mary-Dell Chilton felt drawn to astronomy; in the mid-1950’s she joined a rakish amateur telescope-making group at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. “It was the first place I was really with a bunch of scientists who spoke my language,” she says. In 1955, as a high school junior, she decided to raise her ambitions....

The fact that first graders grow crystals for science projects might lead you to think that physicists know how these snazzy shapes form and unform. Alas, there is still a big blank spot in physics textbooks where the theory of crystal melting should be. “The reason a crystalline structure melts is very subtle,” says Georg Maret of the University of Konstanz in Germany, who received this year’s Gentner-Kastler Prize from the German Physical Society and the French Physics Society for melting away some of that ignorance....

One of my advisers in graduate school used to say that what we humans know about the universe and our existence is a paltry fraction of all that is possible to know. I found this equally tantalizing and frustrating and, like so many other scientists, took comfort in the process of science: a way of thinking that helps you narrow down, through experimentation, observation and critical thinking, what is indeed known....

The year was 1944. World War II was show­ing signs of winding down, but predictions that the Japanese would fight to the bitter end had the Allies gravely concerned that they would run out of gasoline for the war effort. The 23-million-acre Naval Petroleum Reserve in northern Alaska was a prime location for finding new sources of oil, and the U.S. Navy decided to explore. But the navy had a problem: no maps....