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When plans to build North Dakota’s largest transmission line in three decades were unveiled, it seemed as though the political, legal and economic stars were in alignment. Minnesota’s legislators wanted more renewable power, North Dakota farmers looked forward to the extra income, and environmental groups championed the line for carrying “green power” and cutting reliance on coal. A 345-kilowatt, 270-mile-long transmission line in North Dakota has been in the planning stages since 2009....

The annual Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting brings a wealth of scientific minds to the shores of Germany’s Lake Constance. Every summer at Lindau, dozens of Nobel Prize winners exchange ideas with hundreds of young researchers from around the world. Whereas the Nobelists are the marquee names, the younger contingent is an accomplished group in its own right. In advance of this year’s meeting, which focuses on physics, we are profiling several promising attendees under the age of 30....

Faced with a dauntingly complex problem, scientists typically do the logical thing. They break it into component parts, to simplify and focus their efforts. After all, grappling with smaller facets lets you try to conquer, one piece at a time, a larger problem. But the brain’s very nature resists this technique. In effect, it refuses to be compartmentalized. The more researchers may attempt to look at a single processing question, the more it turns out to be interrelated with many other things going on in the brain....

PARASITES UNLEASHED $9.95 at zygotegames.com; ages 8 and up In this zoologist-designed card game, players race to complete a parasite’s life cycle, learning gross-out facts along the way. BIRD MODEL KITS $9.95 each at birdkit.com; ages 14 and up Build mechanical flying birds that flap their wings with the aid of a wind-up rubber band. The kits require patience and precision, but the hard work pays off. DINOSAUR DUNG From $29 at theevolutionstore....

The first in a two-part series on advanced biofuels. In 2008, a group of airlines came to Boeing Co., the world’s largest aerospace company, with a big problem. At that point, the United States, under President Obama, was instituting policies to fight climate change. One of them involved cutting emissions from jet fuel. A year earlier, bipartisan support from Congress had given the new administration what seemed to be a powerful new tool to do it, a law calling for “advanced biofuels....

Teeth and bones, snail shells and bird eggs are formed via a process called biomineralization. Found across all kingdoms of life, this method of incorporating minerals like calcium or silica into hard tissues is clearly very useful in nature. The concept is so powerful that researchers are now working on applying it to the rather unnatural environment found within lithium ion batteries. Organisms build mineralized tissues like shells and bones with the help of proteins, or peptides, which are organic molecules made by the cells of all living things....

A striking new study has raised eyebrows this week with its alarming conclusions about a possible consequence of future climate change. Under an extreme climate change scenario, the study found that huge tracts of stratocumulus clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere—which help to reflect sunlight away from the planet and cool the climate—could disintegrate. If that happens, global temperatures could skyrocket by 8 degrees Celsius, or more than 14 degrees Fahrenheit, the study suggests....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Young people poured into the streets of Glasgow on Nov. 5, 2021, angry and impatient as the first week of the U.N. climate summit ended. Their anger is matched by anxiety in the conference halls as the enormity of what has to be achieved in such a short period of time hovers over a complex process that can become sclerotic....

When Rylea Taylor pulled her son Jaxon from the wreckage of their family car on September 15, she knew instantly that his neck was broken—an injury that usually leaves victims paralyzed or dead. The force of the 70-mile-per-hour head-on collision had fractured Jaxon’s top two vertebrae and torn apart the ligaments that stabilize them. His top vertebra and skull were completely detached from the rest of his spinal column. The spinal cord itself was bent at a 45-degree angle and dangerously vulnerable to further movements that could sever critical nerves....

If you enjoyed doing these little “quantum” experiments, here are a few others that you might find interesting. If you want to really play the role of a quantum physicist, we recommend that you first try to think about what you expect the results to be, before you actually do the measurements. Then, if the results match your expectations, you will know that you have properly understood the situation; and if the results don’t match, you have the opportunity to really learn something!...

By Megan Brooks (Reuters Health) - Anti-obesity medications and surgery can be helpful adjuncts to lifestyle change for obese patients who have failed to lose weight with diet and exercise alone, obesity experts say in a new guideline. The guideline notes that many medications used for comorbid conditions such as diabetes, depression, and other chronic diseases have weight effect and advises clinicians to choose those with favorable weight profiles to help manage obesity, when possible....

Perhaps someday you’ll need to go to the store because you ran out of cathode paint. In June a team of researchers at Rice University and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium announced a new paint-on battery design. The advance, described in the online journal Scientific Reports, could change the way batteries are produced and eliminate restrictions on the surfaces used for energy storage. The paint-on battery consists of five layers: a positive current collector, a cathode that attracts positively charged ions, an ion-conducting separator, an anode to attract negative ions and a negative current collector....

Stepping into the Ebo forest in Cameroon, the chatter of neighboring villagers gives way to silence. A guide and sometimes hunter, Betrand Ngansou, slashes through the thick canopy, slowly making his way along a trail muddied by recent rains and marked with tracks of antelope and porcupine. Shrieks can be heard in the distance. “That is probably the chimps,” Ngansou says. “For those of us living here, it’s impossible not to love that sound....

A newly discovered group of cells present in colorectal tumors may be the source of the cancer’s ability to grow unchecked. Researchers found that tumor cells containing a combination of three proteins were capable of becoming tumors again when injected into mice. They speculate that the cells may be offshoots of healthy stem cells that no longer respond to the body’s natural checks against aggressive, uncontrolled growth. Researchers believe that tumors grow from clumps of cells that mimic stem cells’ ability to reproduce indefinitely and grow tissue made of several kinds of cells—possibly because the mimics were once healthy stem cells, according to the “cancer stem cell” hypothesis....

BALTIMORE—Down the hall from the hospital waiting room where patients await their turn to get medical scans, a middle-aged patient was undergoing an MRI of her lower back. That she had arrived at the hospital in a cage is only the first clue this was no ordinary MRI procedure. There’s the pulse-reading clip normally affixed to a finger that instead was clamped to her tongue. And the disposable bubble wrap tucked under her front paws to keep her warm....

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency surprised many people in 2015 when it announced its scientists had found hydraulic fracturing for natural gas had no “widespread, systemic impacts” on the nation’s drinking water. Some independent studies had shown the opposite. The EPA’s 47-member Science Advisory Board—a panel of outside experts, mostly academics—studied the report’s evidence and found it did not justify that rosy conclusion. As complaints mounted, the EPA changed the words, saying the language was not “quantitatively supported” and “did not clearly communicate the findings of the report....

The healthy adult at rest involuntarily inhales and exhales some 20,000 times a day, as naturally as seawater slides back and forth in a tidal zone. This cycle is so routine and rhythmic that we hardly notice it—except when something goes wrong, such as when we can’t seem to get enough air into our lungs. A number of easily identified disorders can cause such shortness of breath (dyspnea, in technical terms), including asthma, lung infections and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (or COPD, an umbrella term for various conditions that permanently impair airflow through the lungs)....

It was the kind of coming-out party peculiar to Pittsburgh, a city of big iron and bright engineers. On April 29, a crowd gathered on bleachers inside the darkened bay of a giant warehouse in one of the rougher parts of town. A row of one-ton concrete blocks protected the spectators from the performance about to begin. At the podium was Steve Welby, who directs the office of tactical technology at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)....

On a late afternoon in Dec­em­ber 2008, the experiment She­harbano “Sheri” Sangji was work­ing on went up in flames. The 23-­year-old laboratory assistant at the University of California, Los Angeles, suffered second and third degree burns over 43 percent of her body and died almost three weeks later in a hospital burn unit. Now the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has brought felony charges against U.C.L.A. chemistry professor Patrick Harran, the head of Sangji’s lab, and the Regents of the University of California for violations of safety regulations resulting in her death....

Space will be the final frontier for tourists if Sir Richard Branson has his way. Getting there won’t be easy on the wallet—but it won’t be so hard on the planet, either, contends the British adventurer and Virgin Group founder, who touched down at Washington’s National Press Club recently. “Very environmentally friendly,” Branson said. “The [carbon] cost of us putting someone into space will be less than flying to London and back on a commercial plane....