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SAKAI, Kenya – No one complained that the rains were late when they watered the parched hills and muddied the roads here in December. Normally, they would have begun weeks earlier. Villagers were grateful the rain had come at all. “God is great. After these two seasons of the worst drought, now there is something in the fields,” proclaimed Daniel Muthembwa, 76, an elder in this small farming community, a three-hour drive on winding roads from Nairobi....

NBC Learn’s “The Science of NFL Football” episode about Newton’s first law of motion explains that, like an offensive line set on the line of scrimmage before the ball is hiked, a body at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an outside force. Likewise, a body—whether it’s a wide receiver streaking downfield to make a catch or a running back charging into the end zone—moving at constant speed and direction will remain in motion unless acted on by an unbalanced force, in most cases a defensive player moving in the opposite direction....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As of Thursday January 25, 2018, the time on The Doomsday Clock stands at two minutes to midnight, 30 seconds closer to armageddon than its previous setting of two and a half minutes to in January 2017. In fact, this is the nearest the clock has predicted that the world is to nuclear war since 1953, when it was set to 11....

On October 2, 2018, police psychologist Laurence Miller took the stand to testify in the defense of Jason Van Dyke, a white police officer who shot Laquan McDonald, a black teenager from Chicago’s West Side, in 2014. The facts of the case didn’t look good for Van Dyke. A 13-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, he had shot McDonald 16 times within seconds of exiting his squad car. Though McDonald was holding the knife he had reportedly used to damage a patrol vehicle, the 17-year-old was shot while walking away from cops in the middle of the street....

When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, he noted that many of its animal inhabitants were so unafraid of people that “a gun is here almost superfluous”. He swatted birds with his hat, pulled the tails of iguanas and sat on giant tortoises. These antics fuelled his famous idea that animals become tame when they live on remote, predator-free islands. Now, William Cooper Jr of Indiana University–Purdue University in Fort Wayne has tested Darwin’s hypothesis on 66 species of lizards from around the world and found that island dwellers tended to be more docile than their continental relatives — the strongest evidence yet for this classic idea....

The amount of water in the atmosphere of Venus is so low that even the most drought-tolerant of Earth’s microbes wouldn’t be able to survive there, a new study has found. The findings seem to wipe out the hope stirred by last year’s discovery of molecules potentially created by living organisms in the scorched planet’s atmosphere that were seen as an indication of the possible presence of life. The new study looked at measurements from probes that flew through the atmosphere of Venus and acquired data about temperature, humidity and pressure in the thick sulphuric acid clouds surrounding the planet....

Elephant Don: The Politics of a Pachyderm Posse By Caitlin O’Connell. The University of Chicago Press, 2015 Rain: A Natural and Cultural History By Cynthia Barnett. Crown Publishers, 2015 Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World By Richard C. Francis. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015 Project Puffin: The Improbable Quest to Bring a Beloved Seabird Back to Egg Rock By Stephen W. Kress and Derrick Z. Jackson. Yale University Press, 2015 Fire and Ice: Soot, Solidarity, and Survival On the Roof of the World By Jonathan Mingle....

Obsessive gamers’ hours at the computer have now topped scientists’ efforts to improve a model enzyme, in what researchers say is the first crowdsourced redesign of a protein. The online game Foldit, developed by teams led by Zoran Popovic, director of the Center for Game Science, and biochemist David Baker, both at the University of Washington in Seattle, allows players to fiddle at folding proteins on their home computers in search of the best-scoring (lowest-energy) configurations....

The installed price of distributed solar power fell by 40 cents per watt for U.S. residential and small-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems between 2013 and 2014, while large nonresidential systems saw costs fall by an average of 70 cents per watt, according to new Energy Department data released this week. And in some major U.S. markets, plummeting prices for solar PV continued into the first six months of this year, with drops of an additional 20 to 50 cents per watt, or 6 to 13 percent, according to DOE’s latest “Tracking the Sun” report, published this week by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory....

A new study finds that the majority of people in America, Canada and Britain approve of more research in the nascent field of climate manipulation known as geoengineering. A full 72 percent of participants in the survey, published in Environmental Research Letters, said they “supported” or “somewhat supported” the study of solar radiation management (SRM). The technique seeks to inject sulfur into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight and offset the warming caused by carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases....

The Southeast has enough renewable resources to meet the 25 percent renewable-power mandate proposed by draft House energy and climate legislation, according to a new assessment [pdf] by environmental groups. The report was released today as lawmakers negotiate over whether to scale back the renewable electricity standard in the bill sponsored by Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.). A dozen or so moderate and conservative committee Democrats want to lower the target....

Turning the clock back by half a century could be the key to solving one of science’s biggest puzzles: how to bring together gravity and particle physics. At least that is the hope of researchers advocating a back-to-basics approach in the search for a unified theory of physics. In July mathematicians and physicists met at the Banff International Research Station in Alberta, Canada, to discuss a return to the golden age of particle physics....

At certain times of the year, a message from Mars traveling at the speed of light can take 20 minutes to arrive at Earth. As if that weren’t bad enough, space radiation may flip one or more bits, where flipping means turning a 1 into a 0 or vice versa. For this reason, you’ve been called in to help with the coding. Here is what you are told. The spacecraft will send a bunch of messages, each consisting of 100 bits plus some extra bits as we discuss below....

Most physicists foolhardy enough to write a paper claiming that “there are no black holes” — at least not in the sense we usually imagine — would probably be dismissed as cranks. But when the call to redefine these cosmic crunchers comes from Stephen Hawking, it’s worth taking notice. In a paper posted online, the physicist, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and one of the creators of modern black-hole theory, does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape....

Take Action Green Your Downtime Instead of passing time with computer solitaire, try Planet Green Game from Starbucks and Global Green USA. Choose your character and then bike, walk or drive around a virtual town to amass points by exercising your climate change savvy. At the end of the game, links explain how you can take similar actions in the real world. http://www.planetgreengame.com/index.html Kyoto or Bust Although the U.N. Climate Change Conference will bring together leaders of many countries in December, more and more U....

On Valentine’s Day, everywhere you look there are heart-shaped balloons, pink greeting cards and candy boxes filled with chocolate. But what is true love? Does it exist? Or is it simply a cognitive illusion, a trick of the mind? Contrary to the anatomy referenced in all our favorite love songs, love (as with every other emotion we feel) is not rooted in the heart, but in the brain. (Unfortunately, Hallmark has no plans to mass-produce arrow-pierced chocolate brains in the near future....

On January 15, 1919—an unusually warm winter day in Boston—patrolman Frank McManus picked up a call box on Commercial Street, contacted his precinct station and began his daily report. Moments later he heard a sound like machine guns and an awful grating. He turned to see a five-story-high metal tank split open, releasing a massive wall of dark amber fluid. Temporarily stunned, McManus turned back to the call box. “Send all available rescue vehicles and personnel immediately,” he yelled, “there’s a wave of molasses coming down Commercial Street!...

A March news release from the U.S. Geological Survey touted a new study that could be useful for infrastructure planning along the California coastline. At least that’s how the Trump administration conveyed it. The news release hardly stood out. It focused on the methodology of the study rather than its major findings, which showed that climate change could have a withering effect on California’s economy by inundating real estate over the next few decades....

This story was co-published with the Monterey Herald and supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. It’s 1988. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is four years old, and so am I. It is my favorite place on earth, and the sea otters are my favorite animal. During a presentation, an aquarium employee tells me that the southern sea otter has more than one million hairs per square inch (about 155,000 per square centimeter) of its body....

From Smarter: The New Science of Building Brain Power, by Dan Hurley. Reprinted by arrangement with Hudson Street Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), LLC. Copyright © 2013, by Dan Hurley. Back home in New Jersey, I read through dozens of human and animal studies published over the past five years showing that nicotine—freed of its noxious host, tobacco, and delivered instead by chewing gum or transdermal patch—may prove to be a weirdly, improbably effective cognitive enhancer and treatment for relieving or preventing a variety of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s, mild cognitive impairment, ADHD, Tourette’s, and schizophrenia....