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The global climate summit that begins next week in Egypt won’t hinge on backroom discussions among negotiators. The spotlight instead will be trained on the avalanche of climate disasters that the world has experienced in recent years, and whether wealthy nations will commit to offering financial aid to poor countries that are reeling from those perils. That makes this 27th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change different from previous COPs....

The idea of wireless phone charging is enticing: Set your device down for a quick battery top-up while you eat lunch or wait for a plane. No need to carry tangled cords or hunt for a power outlet. Many phones now offer the feature, and charging docks are starting to pop up in airports and restaurants. But calling the current technology “wireless” is still a bit of a stretch. True, your phone is no longer tethered to a cable....

A given in the world of information technology is that the amount of data is only going to grow over time. But how can academics and computer scientists make sense of the mountains of information—whether astronomic calculations from a distant satellite or a study of Internet traffic—if they do not have access to a computer capable of handling such large loads? Yahoo!, Inc., this week offered its vast computing resources to assist with academic pursuits that require a massively parallel computing environment....

On July 2, 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote to Charles Darwin to lament how he had been “so repeatedly struck by the utter inability of numbers of intelligent persons to see clearly or at all, the self acting & necessary effects of Nat Selection, that I am led to conclude that the term itself & your mode of illustrating it, however clear & beautiful to many of us are yet not the best adapted to impress it on the general naturalist public....

By Letitia Stein TAMPA Fla. (Reuters) - Federal forecasters on Thursday downgraded their outlook for the 2014 Atlantic hurricane season, predicting “below normal” activity with seven to 12 named storms, no more than two of which are expected to reach major hurricane status. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said it was more confident of a below-normal season than when it issued its initial advisory in May, when a “near or below normal” season was predicted....

As hundreds of thousands of gallons of dispersants were dropped into the Gulf of Mexico to control the oil spill, Philip Howard did a little digging. He wanted to figure out what was in the chemicals that were being dumped on the Gulf’s fish, turtles and other marine life. But he didn’t get very far. “I was asked to find out what was in that compound. So I went to the chemical’s Material Safety Data Sheet, which was not particularly clarifying,” said Howard, a senior scientist with SRC, a nonprofit environmental research company headquartered in Syracuse, N....

By Alex Dobuzinskis (Reuters) - California lawmakers introduced a bill on Wednesday to legalize assisted suicide in the most populous U.S. state, an effort tearfully welcomed by a woman whose daughter moved to Oregon last year to avail herself of a death-with-dignity law there. The bill proposed by two Democratic state senators is similar to the physician-assisted suicide statute approved by Oregon voters in 1994. As in Oregon, it would require a determination from two doctors that a patient has six months or less to live before a drug to hasten death could be prescribed....

A new DIY machine for opening pores in cells relies on repurposed parts from a common lighter. Called the ElectroPen, it joins a tradition of “frugal science” that aims to equip students and field researchers with low-cost versions of pricey instruments. “The future is synthetic biology: not just coding in a computer, but really coding living cells such that they help us with grand challenges of disease, of climate change, of environmental pollution,” says ElectroPen co-creator Saad Bhamla, a bioengineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology....

On the morning of September 29, 2009, a violent temblor shook the South Pacific seafloor between the islands of Tonga, Samoa and American Samoa. The earthquake stirred up tsunami waves that quickly pummeled the islands; nearly 200 people were killed, most of them in Samoa. The deadly quake was the largest anywhere in the world that year. But new research indicates that the actual event was even more violent than initial estimates had shown and comprised three temblors: a magnitude 8....

Outside a grocery store in Langdon, N.D., two ecologists spotted a yellow canola plant growing on the margins of a parking lot this summer. They plucked it, ground it up and, using a chemical stick similar to those in home pregnancy kits, identified proteins that were made by artificially introduced genes. The plant was GM—genetically modified. That’s not too surprising, given that North Dakota grows tens of thousands of hectares of conventional and genetically modified canola—a weedy plant, known scientifically as Brassica napus var oleifera, bred by Canadians to yield vegetable oil from its thousands of tiny seeds....

On a dark night in 1967, Reed Hayes stepped out onto the gangway over the uranium thickener tank. He was replacing a light bulb during the graveyard shift at the now-demolished Atlas uranium mill in Moab, Utah. He stumbled, reached desperately for the safety line, and grabbed nothing but air. A worker on the previous shift forgot to secure it. “All of a sudden I go plop!” Hayes recalled. “I go clear to the bottom....

Scientists have uncovered two new cases of HIV patients in whom the virus has become undetectable. The two patients, both Australian men, became apparently HIV-free after receiving stem cells to treat cancer. They are still on antiretroviral therapy (ART) “as a precaution”, but those drugs alone could not be responsible for bringing the virus to such low levels, says David Cooper, director of the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who led the discovery....

The gas explosion that rocked a New York City neighborhood last month is the latest warning that leaky urban pipelines are badly in need of an overhaul. The National Transportation and Safety Board’s (NTSB) investigation of the East Harlem blast and fire found small gas leaks below the pavement at the site of the March 12 detonation (pdf) that destroyed two buildings, killing eight people and injuring dozens. Investigators have sent faulty sections of 127-year-old cast-iron pipe as well as a section of 20-centimeter (eight-inch) plastic pipe installed in 2011 to the NTSB lab in Washington, D....

Few ideas in climate science have gained greater public attention in the last decade than the concept of the “carbon budget.” It’s an estimate of how much carbon dioxide can be emitted by humans before temperatures spill over a potentially dangerous threshold. The concept carries immense weight for international climate policy, because the Paris Agreement calls for keeping global temperatures within at least 2 degrees Celsius, if not a more ambitious 1....

Identical twins are identical, right? After all, they derive from just one fertilized egg, which contains one set of genetic instructions, or genome, formed from combining the chromosomes of mother and father. But experience shows that identical twins are rarely completely the same. Until recently, any differences between twins had largely been attributed to environmental influences (otherwise known as “nurture”), but a recent study contradicts that belief. Geneticist Carl Bruder of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his colleagues closely compared the genomes of 19 sets of adult identical twins....

Adapted with permission from Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Justice, by Adam Benforado. Crown Publishers, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC, June 16, 2015. Copyright © 2015, Adam Benforado. All rights reserved. The water in the vat was untroubled and deep. It had been prepared earlier for the brothers, Clement and Evrard. But they were still in the church, standing in front of the assembly, waiting like stalks for a breeze....

If your in-box is currently reporting unread messages in the hundreds or thousands, you might have a hard time believing the news: e-mail is on the decline. The total volume of e-mail has dropped about 10 percent since 2010. The word “e-mail” itself tells you about its origins: it was modeled on written letters. To this day, a lot of e-mail begins with a salutation. Maybe it’s “Hey” instead of “Dear Casey,” but it’s there....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. This year the U.S. Congress is considering changes to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the primary law that governs cyber crime and fraud on the Internet. The act, originally passed in 1986, was aimed at providing a measure of security for computers against unauthorized access to large, time-shared computers. Back then the perceived threat was serious computer hacking—people breaking into the banking system or the nuclear control system (remember the movie War Games?...

The computational “inner loop” of this process is to calculate the average cost. That is, given a set of four packet sizes, compute the average number of packets needed for each order. A technique called dynamic programming works really well for this purpose. See if you can understand how. Here is high level pseudo-code of one dynamic programming method. Goal: Given four sizes 1, s1, s2, s3, find the cost per order....

Rockefeller University neuroscientist Vanessa Ruta was just named a member of the latest class of MacArthur “Genius” grant winners. The fellowship offers a five-year grant of $625,000 to individuals “who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future,” according to the MacArthur Foundation. Fortuitously, or perhaps by design, creativity has been a guiding principle for Ruta, 45, and her work. Both her parents were visual artists, and Ruta herself grew up as a ballet dancer—and at one point considered it a career path....