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It’s been a year since global leaders renewed their climate pledges at the landmark summit in Glasgow, UK. Next week, they’ll convene again in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, during the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP27) to carry on negotiations aimed at reining in global warming. But the world is a different place now: leaders will need to confront the energy crisis spurred by the war in Ukraine, and mounting damages from extreme weather events....

Keith E. Stanovich, an emeritus professor of applied psychology and human development at the University of Toronto, answers: Decades of research have shown that humans are so-called cognitive misers. When we approach a problem, our natural default is to tap the least tiring cognitive process. Typically this is what psychologists call type 1 thinking, famously described by Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman as automatic, intuitive processes that are not very strenuous....

If the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise 2 degrees Celsius by 2036, crossing a threshold that many scientists think will hurt all aspects of human civilization: food, water, health, energy, economy and national security. In my article “False Hope” in the April 2014 Scientific American, I reveal dramatic curves that show why the world will reach this temperature limit so quickly, and also why the recent slowdown in the rate of temperature increase, if it continues, will only buy us another 10 years....

How did you sleep last night? For many people, the answer is “not great.” In the U.S., about a third of people get fewer than seven hours of shut-eye, which is the minimum recommendation. Most of us are familiar with the unpleasant results. We may feel groggy and grumpy, and everything gets just a bit harder to do. But sleeplessness also impairs parts of the brain that affect our social lives and abilities to relate to other people, according to research by neuroscientist Eti Ben Simon, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley....

When I started writing about science decades ago, artificial intelligence seemed ascendant. IEEE Spectrum, the technology magazine for which I worked, produced a special issue on how AI would transform the world. I edited an article in which computer scientist Frederick Hayes-Roth predicted that AI would soon replace experts in law, medicine, finance and other professions. That was in 1984. Not long afterward, the exuberance gave way to a slump known as an “AI winter,” when disillusionment set in and funding declined....

An ice sheet in West Antarctica is breaking from the inside out. The significant new findings published yesterday in Geophysical Research Letters show that the ocean is melting the interior of the Pine Island Glacier, which is about the size of Texas. The crack seems to be accelerating, said Ian Howat, associate professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University and the study’s lead author. The findings are the first confirmation of something glaciologists have long suspected was happening, he said....

By Meeyoung Cho SEOUL (Reuters) - Among the usual commercials for beer, noodles and cars on South Korean TV, one item stands in marked contrast. A short film by a government advisory body carries a stark message: the nation faces a crisis over storing its spent nuclear fuel after running reactors for decades. The world’s fifth-largest user of nuclear power has around 70 percent, or nearly 9,000 tonnes, of its used fuel stacked in temporary storage pools originally intended to hold it for five or six years, with some sites due to fill by the end of 2016....

Gold prospectors may one day use Petri dishes to help with their quests. A species of bacterium forms nanoscale gold nuggets to help it to grow in toxic solutions of the precious metal, reports a paper published online today in Nature Chemical Biology. The molecule with which the bacteria create the particles could one day be used to collect gold from mine waste, says Frank Reith, an environmental microbiologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who works on gold-processing bacteria but was not involved in the latest study....

By Joshua Schneyer, Timothy Gardner and Richard Valdmanis (Reuters) - An unexplained blast this week at a liquefied natural gas (LNG) facility in rural Washington state, which injured workers, forced an evacuation and raised alarm about a potentially large second explosion, could focus attention on the risk of storing massive gas supplies near population centers. The Monday incident at Williams Co Inc’s massive gas storage site is a rare safety-record blemish among the dozens of U....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China pledged on Sunday that it will make sure that 60 percent of its cities meet national pollution standards by 2020, with pressure growing to make cities liveable as hundreds of millions of migrants are expected to relocate from the countryside. China’s environmental problems such as pollution and water scarcity are expected to intensify as rapid migration pushes urban infrastructures to the limit. Almost all Chinese cities monitored for pollution last year failed to meet the standards....

This fall Hurricane Sandy famously knocked out power in lower Manhattan. A friend, I’ll call her Natalie, was stranded in her cold, dark apartment for days. Most New Yorkers hunkered down with gritty reserve. Yet when I finally reached Natalie, she was bright and cheery. She spoke not about the lack of water or frigid nights but about the romance of living by candlelight and the kindness of neighbors. This issue’s lead article on subconscious mental habits reminded me of Natalie....

One of the most profound features of the universe is that it is stratified. Our everyday world depends hardly at all on the details either of atoms or of galaxies, and the feeling is mutual. Were it otherwise, science would not be possible: we could not know anything without knowing everything. Sometimes, though, the levels of reality do get jumbled, with odd effects. This past March a group of cosmologists–Edward Kolb of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Sabino Matarrese, Alessio Notari and Antonio Riotto of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics–argued that the acceleration of cosmic expansion, among the biggest mysteries of modern science, is one such effect....

Johanna writes: “I was recently surprised to hear a nutritionist encourage people to use butter, calling it a healthy fat. I’ve always avoided butter because of the saturated fat. Yet, a quick online search shows multiple articles saying butter is making a comeback as a healthy fat. Can this be true?” It’s true that butter contains saturated fat. It’s also true that saturated fat’s reputation as an artery clogger has been undergoing some rehabilitation in recent years....

Ask friends to list the body’s senses, and they will usually stop after five: taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing. Most do not even notice their sixth sense—the sensation of how one’s head is oriented and moving. But losing this capacity can cause dramatic, disabling vertigo, followed by chronic unstead­iness and blurred vision when the head is in motion. Fortunately, good progress is being made toward the development of bionic ear implants to restore balance in people who suffer from damage to the vestibular labyrinth of the inner ear—the part that provides us with our sixth sense....

In any complex machine, the lack of a single part can lead to big trouble. That is the problem faced by the 170,000 people globally who have the bleeding disorder known as haemophilia. A genetic mutation (usually inherited) suppresses the production of proteins that make blood coagulate. Internal bleeding into the joints causes bone degradation and excruciating pain, and even mild injuries can be life-threatening. The standard therapy is frequent infusions with blood-clotting promoters....

Scientists working in South Africa have unveiled fossils of a human species new to science that they say could be the direct ancestor of our genus, Homo. Discovered in Malapa cave—just 15 kilometers from the sites of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans and Kromdrai, which have yielded a number of important human fossils—the finds comprise two partial skeletons that are nearly 1.95 million years old. The researchers have given them the name Australopithecus sediba....

The brown anole lizard in the Bahamas is raising questions about whether some cold-blooded species may be able to adapt to global warming. Scientists consider cold-blooded species particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their sensitivity to even small temperature shifts. Species like the brown anole lizard maintain their body temperature by moving between sunny and shady areas, in a process called behavioral thermoregulation. Because these species move between “microhabitats” to avoid overheating, some researchers believe that they don’t face adaptive pressures that would favor the survival of individuals with greater heat tolerance....

The top 11 feet of soil in the Arctic continues to thaw. Sinkholes are opening, highways are buckling, houses and forests are tilting, all of which is wreaking havoc on landscapes, wildlife and cities from Murmansk to Juneau. This permafrost layer–defined as soil that remains icy cold for more than two years–covers nearly a quarter of the land in the Northern Hemisphere. But that total is shrinking and new models show that it may nearly disappear by the end of this century....

It is humbling to think that a honeybee, with its milligram-size brain, can perform tasks such as navigating mazes and landscapes on a par with mammals. A honeybee may be limited by having comparatively few neurons, but it surely seems to squeeze everything it can out of them. At the other extreme, an elephant, with its five-million-fold larger brain, suffers the inefficiencies of a sprawling Mesopotamian empire. Signals take more than 100 times as long to travel between opposite sides of its brain—and also from its brain to its foot, forcing the beast to rely less on reflexes, to move more slowly, and to devote 97 percent of the neurons in its brain to the cerebellum, which coordinates each step....

On a daytime flight pick a window seat that will allow you to locate the shadow of the airplane on the clouds; this requires figuring out the direction of travel relative to the position of the sun. If you are lucky, you may be rewarded with one of the most beautiful of all meteorological sights: a multicolored-light halo surrounding the shadow. Its iridescent rings are not those of a rainbow but of a different and more subtle effect called a glory....