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A decision on whether to allow the Keystone XL Pipeline to be built in the U.S. could come at any time, but there are myriad other projects on the table designed to do exactly what Keystone XL was designed to do: transport Canadian tar sands oil to refineries. Those pipelines, both in the U.S. and Canada, are being designed to move the oily bitumen produced from the tar sands to refineries in Texas and eastern Canada, and to ports on the Pacific Coast where the oil could be shipped to Asia....

NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has detected no methane in its first analyses of the Martian atmosphere — news that will doubtless disappoint those who hope to find life on the Red Planet. Living organisms produce more than 90 percent of the methane found in Earth’s atmosphere, so scientists are keen to see if Curiosity picks up any of the gas in Mars’ air. But the 1-ton rover has come up empty in the first atmospheric measurements taken with its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, or SAM, researchers announced today (Nov....

What do the results of the Higgs boson, the “God particle,” mean for science? Join researchers from the Perimeter Institute, Canada’s premier center for theoretical physics, for an interactive, live webcast as they discuss the latest findings from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the biggest, most ambitious scientific experiment in human history. This event, geared towards high school students, teachers and the public, will discuss the findings, background and implications in clear, accessible language....

A parade of El Niño-fueled storms has marched over California in the last few weeks, bringing bouts of much needed rain and snow to the parched state. But maps of drought conditions there have barely budged, with nearly two-thirds of the state still in the worst two categories of drought. So what gives? The short answer, experts say, is that the drought built up over several years (with help from hotter temperatures fueled in part by global warming) and it will take many more storms and almost assuredly more than a single winter—even one with a strong El Niño—to erase it....

If the “nuclear renaissance” is not dead, it appeared in a coma for most of the country following the collapse of Constellation Energy’s plan to build a third reactor on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay shore, energy officials said this weekend. Constellation announced Saturday after news reports surfaced that it could not accept a $7.5 billion conditional federal loan guarantee because the Obama administration had insisted on too great a “down payment” in the form of a credit subsidy charge the developers would have to pay to the federal government to obtain the guarantee....

It is the radio telescope that hunts killer asteroids, probes distant cosmic blasts and decades ago sent Earth’s most powerful message to the stars. Yet the storied Arecibo Observatory, an enormous aluminium dish nestled in a Puerto Rican sinkhole, might soon find itself out of the science game. The US National Science Foundation (NSF), which owns the observatory, wants to offload the facility to free up money for newer ones. In the coming weeks, it will ask for ideas about how Arecibo might be managed if the NSF reduces its current US$8....

Most people would say that employees hate office meetings. “It’s one of those anecdotal things that’s hard to question,” says organizational psychologist Steven G. Rogelberg of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. But when Rogelberg and his colleagues gave 980 workers one of two questionnaires about their time spent in scheduled meetings and overall job satisfaction, the get-togethers were not uniformly panned. Employees who are goal-oriented and whose work does not require much outside input do indeed tend to be generally dissatisfied with meetings....

Life—and the large molecules that make it possible—relies on long chains of carbon, bonded together to form everything from carbohydrates to neurotransmitters. However, the process that occurs in say, in a leaf, in a series of carbon-to-carbon bonding steps known as the Calvin–Benson cycle, has proved difficult to emulate in the lab, because carbon does not seek on its own to bond with its fellow carbon. Now, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to three chemists who developed reactions that harness the catalytic properties of palladium to enable the formation of such carbon-to-carbon bonds at room temperature....

By Chris Arsenault ROME (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Generating three centimeters of top soil takes 1,000 years, and if current rates of degradation continue all of the world’s top soil could be gone within 60 years, a senior UN official said on Friday. About a third of the world’s soil has already been degraded, Maria-Helena Semedo of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) told a forum marking World Soil Day. The causes of soil destruction include chemical-heavy farming techniques, deforestation which increases erosion, and global warming....

The stress of growing up poor can hurt a child’s brain development starting before birth, research suggests—and even very small differences in income can have major effects on the brain. Researchers have long suspected that children’s behaviour and cognitive abilities are linked to their socioeconomic status, particularly for those who are very poor. The reasons have never been clear, although stressful home environments, poor nutrition, exposure to industrial chemicals such as lead and lack of access to good education are often cited as possible factors....

SAN FRANCISCO—The quickest way to curb Arctic melting now underway may be to turn off the tap of short-lived pollutants swirling north from cities and industry far to the south, say scientists at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Preliminary data suggest that these pollutants can increase Arctic surface temperatures as much as 3 degrees Celsius—an effect equal to what scientists expect from carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases....

As people age, they often require bifocals or several pairs of glasses to see objects both near and far. Deep Optics, a technology start-up based in Israel, is working on an alternative: eyeglasses that automatically refocus on any target at which the wearer looks. The “omnifocals” adjust focal length by relying on the interaction between an electric current and liquid crystal, a material in which molecules act like both liquids and solids....

NASA is well-known for its lunar landings and missions to Mars. But the agency makes major use of its space expertise running satellites that monitor the Earth, its climate and its weather. It currently operates 16 Earth science research missions, and the agency’s Earth Science Division is scheduled to launch up to five more in 2014. Michael Freilich, the scientist who directs the Earth Science Division, took a few minutes to discuss with ClimateWire the importance of the Earth science missions and what he is looking forward to in the new year....

In a photograph from a 1947 newspaper advertisement, a smiling mother leans over her baby’s crib. The wall behind her is decorated with rows of flowers and Disney characters. Above the photo, a headline reads “Protect Your Children From Disease Carrying Insects.” The ad, for wallpaper impregnated with DDT, captures a moment of historical ignorance, before the infamous insecticide nearly wiped out many birds and turned up inside the bodies of virtually everyone on Earth....

From Ensia (find the original story here); reprinted with permission. March 6, 2017 — I flew into Unalakleet, Alaska, on a late fall day. With about 700 people, Unalakleet is large by rural Alaska standards and serves as a regional hub. The village is located on a sandy spit of land where a clear river meets the turbid water of the Bering Sea. Out the plane window the sun shone bright, glittering off the wind-tossed whitecaps of the sea....

Particle smasher The long wait is over: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will reboot in March after a two-year shutdown. The machine at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, will restart with collisions at 13 trillion electronvolts—almost double the current record. Scientists hope that the extra firepower will help the collider to unearth phenomena that fill in gaps in the standard model of particle physics. The popular theory of supersymmetry, already in doubt, could lose further favor if the upgraded LHC cannot find evidence of the many heavy particles that the theory predicts....

Most of us take it for granted that math works—that scientists can devise formulas to describe subatomic events or that engineers can calculate paths for space­craft. We accept the view, initially espoused by Galileo, that mathematics is the language of science and expect that its grammar explains experimental results and even predicts novel phenomena. The power of mathematics, though, is nothing short of astonishing. Consider, for example, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s famed equations: not only do these four expressions summarize all that was known of electromagnetism in the 1860s, they also anticipated the existence of radio waves two decades before German physicist Heinrich Hertz detected them....

It must be difficult for the roughly half a billion people who visit Wikipedia every month to remember a world without the free online encyclopedia. Since co-founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia on January 15, 2001, the site has grown into a behemoth of information with about 35 million articles and 30 million images available in nearly 300 different languages. The English-language Wikipedia site alone features more than five million articles....

By Carey Gillam GUTHRIE Oklahoma (Reuters) - Inside the small U-Haul rental office in Guthrie, Oklahoma, Tami Boxley routinely deals with something that once was rare: the rattling, booming roll of the earth. In the last week alone, residents of Guthrie, pop. 10,191, have felt five quakes rock the town a half hour’s drive from Oklahoma City. The most recent rippled through Friday after lunchtime, duly recorded on the “QuakeWatch” application many residents have loaded onto their smartphones....

In a new play, Alan Turing turns to a colleague in a moment of epiphany. “Mathematics,” he says triumphantly, “is a landscape riddled with holes and paradoxes. It is a chaos filled not with reasons and whys, but with contradictions and why nots.” The mathematician may never have uttered these exact words, but his character did in Friday’s New York City workshop performance of Pure. The new play, by A. Rey Pamatmat, explores the mysterious parallels between Turing’s work and his personal life, suggesting that the chaos Turing finds in mathematics is actually a reflection of his own complexities....