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A new family tree of dogs containing more than 160 breeds reveals the hidden history of man’s best friend, and even shows how studying canine genomes might help with research into human disease. In a study published on April 25 in Cell Reports, scientists examined the genomes of 1,346 dogs to create one of the most diverse maps produced so far tracing the relationship between breeds. The map shows the types of dog that people crossed to create modern breeds and reveals that canines bred to perform similar functions, such as working and herding dogs, don’t necessarily share the same origins....

By Rory Carroll(Reuters) - The governors of California, New York and six other states have agreed to put 3.3 million zero-emission vehicles on the road within 12 years, which they said will help the environment and boost the economy.The states will start by harmonizing building codes to make it easier to construct electric car charging stations and will consider financial incentives to promote zero-emission vehicles, according to the agreement, which was announced on Thursday in Sacramento....

In E. B White’s beloved novel Charlotte’s Web, an old sheep advises the gluttonous rat Templeton that he would live longer if he ate less. “Who wants to live forever?” Templeton sneers. “I get untold satisfaction from the pleasures of the feast.” It is easy to empathize with Templeton, but the sheep’s claim has some merit. Studies have shown that reducing typical calorie consumption, usually by 30 to 40 percent, extends life span by a third or more in many animals, including nematodes, fruit flies and rodents....

How do you count Komodo dragons? With some cameras and the element of surprise. Camera traps are frequently used to take pictures and monitor populations of large mammals like tigers and leopards, but until now, they haven’t been used often to count Komodo dragonsthe world’s largest lizardsor other reptiles and amphibians. Recent research suggests that they can and should be used to keep tabs on these animals, and that cameras may beat the physical traps currently used to monitor Komodo dragon populations....

Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, but her early eons were tempestuous. Not even rock survives from the first 500 million years of her life—an eon known as the Hadean—because geologists speculate the planet’s surface boiled and bubbled with molten lava under a steady bombardment of comets and meteorites. But tiny diamonds discovered in antediluvian zircon crystals sprinkled in three-billion-year old rocks from Australia hint that the planet’s surface fire might have ceased much earlier than previously believed....

The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense. Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York....

For more than three hours, a colleague and I walked through the grassy foothills of the Drakensberg Mountains in KwaZulu-Natal, meeting not a soul on the way. Ultimately, we came to a wide cave half-screened by bushes and a splashing waterfall. Behind this watery veil are some of the finest specimens of ancient San, or “Bushman,” rock painting in South Africa. The water has not damaged them, although vandals have. We gazed at walls covered with more than 1,600 images of humans and animals engaged in myriad activities....

Here’s a test. Without looking them up on Google, try to guess the meanings of the foreign antonyms tobi and kekere. They are words in Yoruba, a widely spoken West African language that has its roots in the Old Stone Age. The words are equivalent to the English antonyms big, small. Now, take another guess: which one’s which? The majority of us will arrive at the same answer. In fact, if we repeat the exercise with antonyms for shapes, sound intensities or even brightness in other foreign languages, we will still agree more than half the time....

Thirty years ago a team of NASA astronauts tipped the Hubble Space Telescope out of a space shuttle’s cargo bay and into low-Earth orbit. High above our planet’s starlight-smearing atmosphere, Hubble could study phenomena across the cosmos that ground-based observatories could never hope to see. It was not the first space telescope, but it is by far the longest-lived and most productive—thanks in large part to an innovative design that allowed Hubble to be visited, repaired and upgraded....

By Erika Check Hayden of Nature magazineAs president of global health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, based in Seattle, Washington, 66-year-old Tachi Yamada has been responsible for allocating billions of dollars to health projects around the world. He leaves this month after 5 years in the job. So does he think he made a difference? Yamada spoke to Nature about his past achievements, future plans and the challenges ahead for the planet’s health....

Apple’s war against Android and Google has been less “thermonuclear” and more precision sniping against key partners, with the two technology giants so far unwilling to directly go head to head. The kerfuffle between Apple and Samsung Electronics (read CNET’s full coverage here) has breathed new life into the lingering question: why doesn’t Apple just sue Google? Google, after all, is the architect of the Android operating system, which is the common thread tying together all of Apple’s legal targets....

Minutes after midnight, on March 24, 1989, the supertanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound on Alaska’s southern coast. Some 10.8 million gallons (40,900 kiloliters) of oil spilled from the deep gash in the ship’s hull, eventually washing up on more than 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) of pristine coastline, causing what still stands as the worst oil spill in U.S. history. Slide Show: Preventing Another Exxon Valdez Disaster...

When a broad range of vaccines against COVID-19 were being tested in clinical trials, only a few experts expected the unproven technology of mRNA to be the star. Within 10 months, mRNA vaccines were both the first to be approved and the most effective. Although these are the first mRNA vaccines to be approved, the story of mRNA vaccines starts more than 30 years ago, and there have been many bumps in the road along the way....

A German children’s book from 1845 by Heinrich Hoffman featured “Fidgety Philip,” a boy who was so restless he would writhe and tilt wildly in his chair at the dinner table. Once, using the tablecloth as an anchor, he dragged all the dishes onto the floor. Yet it was not until 1902 that a British pediatrician, George Frederic Still, described what we now recognize as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Since Still’s day, the disorder has gone by a host of names, including organic drivenness, hyperkinetic syndrome, attention-deficit disorder and now ADHD....

How do salt and sugar prevent microbial spoilage? —K. RAJYAGURU, LIBERTYVILLE, ILL. Mickey Parish, chair of the nutrition and food science department at the University of Maryland, explains: Salt (usually sodium chloride) and sugar (generally sucrose) interfere with microbial growth in several ways to block decay in food. The most notable way is through simple osmosis, resulting in dehydration. The salt or sugar, whether in solid or dissolved form, attempts to reach equilibrium with the salt or sugar content of the food product with which it is in contact....

OSLO, Oct 12 (Reuters) - Governments took a step towards greener economic growth in 2014 but will need to do far more to limit rising temperatures to a United Nations goal of two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), a study by accountancy firm PwC said on Monday. The carbon intensity of the world economy - the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per dollar of gross domestic product (GDP) - fell by 2....

The weekend can’t start soon enough for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who watched as investors drove down the company’s stock by more than 11 percent Friday after a disappointing earnings report raised questions about demand for the latest Windows operating system as well as the Surface tablet. The stock finished at $31.40, off $4.04 for the day. The percentage decline – which wiped out more than $32 billion in stockholder value – was the biggest slide in Microsoft’s stock since the year 2000....

Every summer near-perpetual sunlight pours down on much of the ice-swaddled island of Greenland. On many parts of the ice sheet, especially at lower elevations, meltwater flows across the surface and collects in deep-blue ponds and lakes, such as the one shown here. Unlike the lakes we swim in, these water bodies can disappear in a wink: a lake that would fill the Superdome in New Orleans more than a dozen times can drain through a crack in the ice in just 90 minutes....

In 1994 I reinvented myself. A physicist and engineer at General Atomics, I was part of an internal think tank charged with answering hard questions from any part of the company. Over the years, I worked on projects as diverse as cold fusion and Predator drones. But by the early 1990s I was collaborating frequently with biologists and geneticists. They would tell me what cool new technologies they needed to do their research; I would go try to invent them....

Subject cDa29—well-known yet anonymous—resides somewhere in the north of England. You can almost see it: the peat stacks and old textile mills; the limestone and turf ruins where, on divine calling, Hadrian marked the northernmost reach of the Roman Empire. But even were you there, you wouldn’t see it the way cDa29 does. That’s because cDa29 is tetrachromatic: while most people see their world as a mix of three colors—red, green and blue—cDa29 sees hers in four....