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Consider this partial list of issues that the next president of the U.S. will need to address: reducing greenhouse gas emissions; ensuring freshwater supplies; encouraging reliance on renewable energy sources; preparing for pandemics; developing stem cell technologies; improving science education; stimulating technological innovation. How many of the current candidates for the presidency have stated clear positions on those subjects? What reasons would they give for their stances, and how well could they defend them?...

On February 14, some media outlets received internal documents of the Heartland Institute, a think-tank funded in part by oil and coal companies that downplays the role of human activity in climate change. The documents contained putative evidence that Heartland was funding efforts to influence what elementary schools teach about climate science. On February 20, Peter Gleick, a nationally known expert on water resources, admitted that he had obtained the documents by posing as a Heartland board member....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. When you hear someone laugh behind you, you probably picture them on the phone or with a friend – smiling and experiencing a warm, fuzzy feeling inside. Chances are just the sound of the laughter could make you smile or even laugh along. But imagine that the person laughing is just walking around alone in the street, or sitting behind you at a funeral....

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md.—Flexible solar cells now power communications equipment used by U.S. Marines fighting in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, enabling them to shed 315 kilograms worth of batteries while on foot patrol. But an F-16 fighter jet flying over Miramar training base in California burns 105 liters of jet fuel a minute with its afterburners engaged whereas the C-17 cargo consumes 11,350 liters an hour. That heavy reliance on oil—much of it imported—presents a real challenge to the U....

Surgeons at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore last month successfully removed a donor’s healthy kidney through her vagina instead of through an incision in her abdomen. This is not the first time kidneys have been pulled from the body this way, but it is the first time such a procedure has been performed to remove a healthy organ. The kidney was removed from Kimberly Johnson, 48, of Lexington Park, Md....

January 1964 Battling Trachoma “Nearly 500 million people—more than a sixth of the world’s population—are infected with the blinding eye disease known since ancient Greek times as trachoma. It is only within the past six years that investigators have positively identified the cause. The agent of the disease is a virus, or near virus, markedly similar to those responsible for psittacosis (‘parrot fever’) and the venereal disease lymphogranuloma venereum. This knowledge offers the exciting prospect that it may be possible to control the disease by vaccination and thus bring to an end its long career as a major scourge of mankind....

Phytoplankton in the Pacific Ocean are starved for iron, and as a result these microscopic plants soak up less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than was previously thought, researchers have found. Although the difference in carbon uptake is not enough to perturb climate predictions significantly, the research should lead to an improved understanding of how climate changes will affect phytoplanktons ability to take up carbon. The worlds oceans tend to absorb carbon dioxide in the form of carbonate, but the Pacific Ocean actually emits CO2 in areas of cold, upwelling water that warms as it reaches the surface, releasing the gas....

We may think we have an ability to be fair and impartial—to make decisions and judgments based on the weight of evidence. But unfortunately, we humans are all irrational. When faced with an overwhelming amount of information, our brains take shortcuts; instead of taking time to analyze, we may accept a group decision or a trusted expert. Worse, even when we have time to consider our decisions, we prefer to interpret the evidence to fit our preexisting beliefs, called confirmation bias....

By Kevin Gray MIAMI (Reuters) - The 2014 Atlantic hurricane season is expected to be quieter than normal, with a below-average number of storms and hurricanes, a leading U.S. hurricane forecasting team said on Thursday. Forecasters at Colorado State University (CSU) predicted this year’s season will see nine tropical storms, three of which will intensify into a hurricane and one becoming a major hurricane with winds of at least 111 miles per hour....

Popular television shows that put black and white characters on an equal footing as doctors or detectives may still be transmitting racial bias nonverbally, according to a new study. Researchers found that in a selection of brief, silent clips from 11 prime-time television shows, white characters were consistently rated as behaving more positively toward other white characters than toward black ones, even when the black characters were deemed equal to their white counterparts in attractiveness, kindness and intelligence....

By June 15 gasoline-powered augers will have drilled 100 holes in the corn, cotton and peanut fields of the Lower Flint River Basin in southwest Georgia. Into the holes, scientists from the University of Georgia (U.G.A.) will slip half-meter-long PVC pipes filled with sensors for soil moisture and temperature topped with a flexible antenna that can be run over by a tractor and spring back into place. Over the course of the next two years, these sensors will continuously relay soil conditions from 20, 40 and 60 centimeters deep to a computer....

Killer whales have group-specific dialects, sperm whales babysit one another’s young and bottlenose dolphins cooperate with other species. These social skills are all closely linked with the aquatic mammals’ brain sizes, according to a recent study in Nature Ecology & Evolution. Scientists first proposed a relation between social living and brain expansion, or encephalization, nearly three decades ago, when they observed that primate species with larger brains typically lived in bigger groups....

As the planet heats up so do the world’s waters, and that means more coral bleaching. But now a new study reveals that some corals can bounce back from such near death experiences. The heat death of a reef reveals itself as whitening, dubbed coral bleaching, which results when corals expel the tiny plants that provide food and are responsible for the rainbow of reef colors. In 2014, coral bleaching happened in the northern Mariana Islands, the Marshall Islands, the Hawaiian Islands and even the Florida Keys....

In a clearing in a subtropical rain forest in northern Australia, you can watch the light dance as it filters through the rustling canopy. Below, the leaves of the bushes form an intricate pattern of shadows on the trunks of trees. A wallaby grazes in the open space. You raise your smartphone and aim it at the tranquil marsupial. Just as you tap the button to take its picture, the wallaby notices you and hops away....

Dinosaurs took less than 5 million years to evolve from their reptile predecessors, the early dinosauromorphs, a new study finds. The finding revamps the time line between the dinosaurs and early dinosauromorphs. Until now, researchers thought that it took at least 10 million to 15 million years for the early dinosauromorphs to evolve into dinosaurs. “It really narrows the amount of time between the appearance of these early dinosauromorphs and the first dinosaurs,” said study co-researcher Randall Irmis, a paleontologist at the University of Utah and a curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah....

Free-floating messages in the bloodstream could soon provide a unique window into the body. Researchers worldwide are racing to decipher circulating genetic material for better ways to diagnose disease, monitor pregnancy, and even improve food safety. Circulating DNA and RNA—temporary gene copies that act as blueprints for protein production—was first discovered in 1948. Researchers still do not fully understand how the free-floating genetic fragments (chemically referred to as nucleic acids) survive outside the protective barriers of cells, but recent technological advances now allow scientists to comb through these tiny messages for clues about human health....

A ccording to conventional paleontological wisdom, an asteroid or comet 10 to 14 kilometers wide crashed into the present-day Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs. Most scientists currently consider the Chicxulub impact crater, perhaps about 145 kilometers wide, to be the smoking gun of this Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction. Not so fast, says Princeton University micropaleontologist Gerta Keller. The collision that created the Chicxulub crater, she argues, happened before the KT extinction–300,000 years too soon, to be more precise....

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. —Albert Einstein What we experience shapes our reality. “Seeing is believing,” right? Not necessarily. Visual illusions can distort our perception so that what we “see” does not correspond with what is physically there. This special edition of Scientific American Mind explores the world of sensory illusions and delves into how they fool the brain. The word “illusion” derives from the Latin illudere, “to mock,” whereas the word itself has roots in 14th-century Anglo-French, meaning an act of deception....

You probably know the GIF as the perfect vehicle for sharing memes and reactions. We believe the format can go further, that it has real power to capture science and explain research in short, digestible loops. So each Friday, we’ll round up the week’s most GIF-able science. Enjoy and loop on. The Best Brain Ever Credit: From “Data from: 7 Tesla MRI of the Ex Vivo Human Brain at 100 Micron Resolution,” by B....

Many children never master fractions. When asked whether 12/13 + 7/8 was closest to 1, 2, 19, or 21, only 24% of a nationally representative sample of more than 20,000 US 8th graders answered correctly. This test was given almost 40 years ago, which gave Hugo Lortie-Forgues and me hope that the work of innumerable teachers, mathematics coaches, researchers, and government commissions had made a positive difference. Our hopes were dashed by the data, though; we found that in all of those years, accuracy on the same problem improved only from 24% to 27% correct....