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Scientists believe they can better pinpoint how much future climate change the world can expect. There’s some good news: It won’t likely be as bad as the worst-case predictions. The bad news: It’ll probably be worse than the rosiest projections. New research published yesterday in the journal Nature claims to have substantially narrowed down the scientific estimate of how much warming would occur if carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere were to double from their preindustrial levels....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Two young computer scientists have figured out how to fairly divide cake among any number of people, setting to rest a problem mathematicians have struggled with for decades. Their work has startled many researchers who believed that such a fair-division protocol was probably impossible. Cake-cutting is a metaphor for a wide range of real-world problems that involve dividing some continuous object, whether it’s cake or, say, a tract of land, among people who value its features differently—one person yearning for chocolate frosting, for example, while another has his eye on the buttercream flowers....

It hurts to keep secrets. Secrecy is associated with lower well-being, worse health, and less satisfying relationships. Research has linked secrecy to increased anxiety, depression, symptoms of poor health, and even the more rapid progression of disease. There is a seemingly obvious explanation for these harms: Hiding secrets is hard work. You have to watch what you say. If asked about something related to the secret, you must be careful not to slip up....

Dear EarthTalk: How can I have a greener, healthier laundry room?—Billie Alexander, Topeka, Kans. While there are many ways to green one’s laundry room, one place to start is with detergent. Luckily, in 2009 the federal government phased out phosphates, harsh chemicals that help break down minerals and loose food bits during the wash cycle, because their presence in waste water causes algae blooms in downstream waterways. But mainstream detergents still often contain the surfactant nonylphenol ethoxylate (NPE), which researchers have identified as an endocrine-disrupting estrogen mimic, meaning exposure to it can cause reproductive and other human health problems....

By David DeKok HARRISBURG Pa. (Reuters) - A high rate of cancer among inmates at a southwestern Pennsylvania prison is linked to a nearby coal ash dump, and the correctional facility should be closed down, according to a report made public on Tuesday. Eleven prisoners died of cancer from 2010 through 2013, and six others have been diagnosed with cancer at the State Correctional Institution Fayette, said the report, released by the Abolitionist Law Center, a public interest law firm based in Pittsburgh, and the Human Rights Coalition, a national prison reform group....

On a broiling day in July 2009, a caravan of four-wheel-drive vehicles traveled a faint, two-track dirt road in southwestern Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin. The expedition was headed for an area known as Salt Sage Draw in search of buried treasure: fossils dating to between 55 million and 50 million years ago, at the start of the Eocene epoch, when the ancestors of many modern orders of mammals were beginning to replace the more archaic mammals that had existed during the earlier Paleocene epoch....

By Marton KruppaLONDON (Reuters) - A billion-dollar scheme to reduce household emissions in the Czech Republic costs five times as much per ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) as some European industries need to spend to achieve the same cuts, government data showed.The scheme’s expense, $105 per ton of greenhouse gas emissions cut, highlights the burden that European governments face in meeting a mid-century decarbonisation goal.The Czech government has ploughed 20.5 billion crowns ($1....

By Noreen O’Donnell(Reuters) - A dangerous storm that brought snow and drenching rains to the southwestern United States blamed for several road deaths is threatening Thanksgiving travel for millions of people in the eastern states, forecasters said on Saturday.The storm is expected to bring heavy rain to the Southeast on Tuesday and then turn north and move up the East Coast, possibly disrupting travel through Wednesday, according to the meteorologists at AccuWeather....

As it travels between hosts, SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, appears as a tiny, spiky orb, around 120 billionths of a meter across. Expelled from the human body – by a cough, say, or a well-placed sneeze – the virus can settle on surfaces, where it sits, microscopic and immobile, for hours or even days. If something comes along and touches the surface, the virus can travel with it – to a human hand, then from a hand to a face, and from there into the body....

FALLON, Calif. —Fourth-generation rancher Loren Poncia calls himself a soil geek, and California wants to pay him for it. “If the soil is healthier, everything is better: the grass, the cows and the pocketbook,” said the rancher, gesturing toward the yellow perennial grasses streaked with green that cover Stemple Creek Ranch in the hills of Petaluma in Northern California. The planet’s climate might be better off, too. Increasingly more research shows that agricultural practices like cover cropping, no-till farming, composting or even the use of biochar can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, boosting the organic matter in the soil....

The professor takes great care in how he speaks. He knows when to talk and when to smile, when a laugh can disarm his listeners and draw them into his point. When answering questions, he’ll pause mid-sentence to repeat the questioner’s name, then continue. Lately he has been pondering this question: For decades, advocates have tried the emotional and rational sells for saving energy. Turn off the lights, program the air-conditioner, unplug idle appliances, and it’ll either benefit the planet or save piles of cash....

From Simons Science News (find original story here). Thirty years ago, the mathematician William Thurston articulated a grand vision: a taxonomy of all possible finite three-dimensional shapes. Thurston, a Fields medalist who spent much of his career at Princeton and Cornell, had an uncanny ability to imagine the unimaginable: not just the shapes that live inside our ordinary three-dimensional space, but also the far vaster menagerie of shapes that involve such complicated twists and turns that they can only fit into higher-dimensional spaces....

Google has finally acknowledged that it is behind the mystery barge in San Francisco Bay, and that, as has been reported, it is likely to use the structure it’s building there to showcase its technology. CNET was first to report the Google connection to the odd edifice, covered in scaffolding and dark netting, that sits on top of a barge in San Francisco Bay. A second such structure is located in Casco Bay off Portland, Maine, after having been constructed in New London, Conn....

For years researchers have held out hope that graphene would be the material to pick up the mantle in the electronics industry when silicon hits its limits as the material of choice for making devices smaller, faster and cheaper. Yet, turning graphene’s promise into a reality has been difficult to say the least, in part because of the inherent difficulty of working with a substance one atom thick. Methods of cutting graphene into useable pieces tend to leave frayed edges that mitigate the material’s effectiveness as a conductor....

Todd M. Hamilton, an associate professor and chair of the department of chemistry at Adrian College, explains. Nuclear scientists continue to expand the periodic table as they detect new elements. These novel elements, such as the recently discovered 118, pose a challenge to researchers because they are so fleeting. When a heavy element disintegrates, or decays, it gives off a radiation signature that can be used to prove that it existed....

Jellyfish never stop. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, they move through the water in search of food such as shrimp and fish larvae, on journeys that can cover several kilometers a day. They are more efficient than any other swimmer, using less energy for their size than do graceful dolphins or cruising sharks. “Their cost of transport—the oxygen they use to move—is 48 percent lower than any other swimming animal,” says Bradford J....

A lot more genes may separate humans from their chimp relatives than earlier studies let on. Researchers studying changes in the number of copies of genes in the two species found that their mix of genes is only 94 percent identical. The 6 percent difference is considerably larger than the commonly cited figure of 1.5 percent. The new finding supports the idea that evolution may have given humans new genes with new functions that don’t exist in chimps, something researchers had not recognized until recently....

Dear EarthTalk: What is the scientific consensus on all the extreme weather we’ve been having—from monster tornadoes to massive floods and wildfires? Is there a clear connection to climate change? And if so, what are we doing to be prepared?—Jason Devine, Summit, Pa. Extreme weather does not prove the existence of global warming, but climate change is likely to exaggerate it—by messing with ocean currents, providing extra heat to forming tornadoes, bolstering heat waves, lengthening droughts and causing more precipitation and flooding....

Jellyfishes rely on drifting to eat. They take their luck with currents, and create tiny eddies to guide food toward their tendrils. Yet in waters from the Sea of Japan (aka East Sea) to the Black Sea, jellies today are thriving as many of their marine vertebrate and invertebrate competitors are eliminated by overfishing, dead zones and other human impacts. How have these drifters of the sea reversed millions of years of fish dominance, seemingly overnight?...

When computers, servers and digital storage devices began to find their way en masse into businesses and homes in the late 1970s and early 80s, industrious users figured out these systems could be linked together into local area networks (LANs) that enabled the rapid exchange of information from machine to machine. Medical technology makers are now hoping to scale this model down to the personal level by connecting wireless sensors placed on (or even under) a patient’s skin to create “medical body area networks” (MBANs) that provide doctors with real-time info about their patients....