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Old-growth forests can provide a refuge for heat-sensitive birds as temperatures rise across the Pacific Northwest, according to new research. Ancient forests tend to provide moderate temperatures compared with their surroundings, potentially buffering some of the sharpest impacts of climate change, said Matthew Betts, a professor at Oregon State University. With that knowledge, Betts and a team of researchers set off to see if the birds that breed in the canopies of these old groves benefit from their surroundings....

Human activities are killing wildlife at unprecedented rates, with causes ranging from environmental pollution to the built environment. For some bird species, night-time collisions with power lines are driving substantial population declines. But now scientists have come up with a clever way to make the cables easier for birds to spot, without being unsightly to humans. Industry and U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service guidelines recommend that utility companies mark their power lines with plastic attachments to increase visibility, but birds are still dying....

In 1906, zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings published Behavior of the Lower Organisms, a book that contained a provocative idea: microbes can change their minds. His subject was a single cell bristling with beating hairs called Stentor. These trumpet-shaped predators are so large fish can eat them and humans can see them, and so brazen they can catch and eat rotifers—proper animals with hundreds of cells and a simple brain. In the microbial galaxy, stentors lie somewhere between Star Destroyer and sarlacc pit....

When a young physician opted to do a short stint in Grant Churchill’s pharmacology lab as part of his medical training, he asked for a task that would quickly teach him the tools of the trade. “So I thought, ‘I have a good project for you’,” says Churchill. That was in 2010, and Churchill’s group at the University of Oxford, UK, was looking for ways to treat bipolar disorder without using lithium—a drug that often works well, but is plagued with side effects....

An electric car future is speeding closer; economic analysts project that a third of all automobiles could be battery-powered by 2040. Most of these vehicles rely on large lithium-ion batteries, prompting worries about whether the world’s lithium supply can keep up. But another element—cobalt—is a bigger concern, scientists reported in October in the journal Joule. “The best lithium battery cathodes [negative electrodes] all contain cobalt, and its production is limited,” says study lead Elsa Olivetti, a materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....

For the past 22 years Jaime Guevara-Aguirre has served as the de facto physician for a truly unique community in Ecuador. His patients stand on average 1.2 meters tall, a result of a rare genetic disorder known as Laron syndrome. Of the approximately 300 people in the world known to have the condition, a third reside in the remote mountainside villages of southern Ecuador. Another remarkable fact about Guevara-Aguirre’s patients: virtually none of them suffer from cancer or diabetes....

Stressful events early in a person’s life, such as neglect or abuse, can have psychological impacts into adulthood. New research shows that these effects may persist in their children and even their grandchildren. Larry Feig and Lorena Saavedra-Rodríguez, biochemists at the Tufts University School of Medicine, caused chronic social stress in adolescent mice by regularly relocating them to new cages over the course of seven weeks. The researchers then tested these stressed mice in adulthood using a series of standard laboratory measures for rodent anxiety, such as how long the mice spent in open areas of a maze and how frequently they approached mice they had never met before....

In the first human trial of its kind, a vaccine grown in genetically engineered tobacco plants has proved to be safe, paving the way to one day use it to help combat a potentially fatal form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that the experimental vaccine triggered the immune systems of 11 of 16 volunteers (with so-called follicular B-cell lymphoma) to attack their tumors without any apparent dangerous side effects....

I am very sure that there is life up there, somewhere in our solar system,” says Christine Moissl-Eichinger, a microbiologist at the Medical University of Graz in Austria. But like any scientist, Moissl-Eichinger knows full well that substantial proof is needed for such a substantial claim. So she and others are working to find that proof—both here on Earth and on Mars. On the Red Planet, NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance is searching for fossils and traces of alien biochemistry in Jezero Crater, an ancient lake bed thought to have once offered habitable conditions for microbial life....

Kenneth Buckle, a visiting scientist at the Center for Integrated Manufacturing Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology, provides this explanation. This question, which appears simple and direct, is actually filled with subtlety and complication. First, the definition of a battery must be established. There are a variety of chemical and mechanical devices that are called batteries, although they operate on different physical principles. A battery for the purposes of this explanation will be a device that can store energy in a chemical form and convert that stored chemical energy into electrical energy when needed....

Nobody knows the extent to which rocket launches and re-entering space debris affect Earth’s atmosphere — but such ignorance could be remedied soon. The issue of rocket emissions—which deliver gases and particles directly into the middle and upper atmosphere—will be included in a forthcoming United Nations 2018 Quadrennial Global Ozone Assessment that delves into the substances responsible for ozone depletion. “The 2018 assessment is really the first one to have a substantial section on rocket emissions, not just a passing thought,” said Martin Ross, a lead author of the relevant section in the upcoming report....

Happy New Year! It’s 2013 and you’ve vowed to cut sweets out of your diet. Despite your desire for a trimmer body, the sight of cupcakes in a café window overpowers your good intentions. You cannot resist the small, sweet reward even though the larger, delayed reward of a healthier body is ultimately more desirable. What leads some of us to give in to our immediate urges, while others are able to endure the wait for bigger and better outcomes?...

Hurricane Sam is churning across the Atlantic Ocean as a Category 4 storm after it ballooned into a major maelstrom in a few short days. Still a tropical storm as of Thursday night, Sam intensified into a Category 3 hurricane by Saturday morning, then continued to strengthen. According to the National Hurricane Center, it’s expected to remain a major hurricane for at least another day or two. Meteorologists don’t expect Hurricane Sam to make landfall in the United States, although it could affect parts of the Caribbean....

By Nita Bhalla NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - India plans to urgently immunize around 300,000 children against the crippling polio virus after a strain of the highly contagious disease was detected in sewage in the southern city of Hyderabad, the ministry of health said on Wednesday. India was declared polio free by the World Health Organization in March 2014 after an almost two-decade long, multi-million dollar effort – lauded as one of the country’s biggest public health achievements in recent times....

How much would you pay if someone hijacked your computer files and demanded a fee for their safe return? $100? $1,000? Malicious software named CryptoLocker is currently infecting computers via poisoned e-mail attachments that lock up the machine’s data unless the owner agrees to pay $300 within 72 hours. Cybersecurity firms first noticed CryptoLocker in early September. Attacks have increased over the past few weeks, and yesterday they reported that a new version of the malware gives people more time to recover their files — for about $1,600 above the original asking price....

Extraordinary properties emerge as scientists manipulate construction blocks at the nanometer scale. Diamond nanorods discovered by Natalia Dubrovinskaia of the University of Bayreuth in Germany and her colleagues pack together into a dense form of carbon that is harder than diamond. Potential industrial applications for materials made from nanorods include the cutting and polishing of alloys and ceramics. Carbon was also the material chosen by Pulickel M. Ajayan and his colleagues at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to create superresilient springs....

Key concepts Chemistry Surfactants Density Polarity Introduction You may have heard people say, “Those two mix like oil and water,” when they’re describing two people who don’t get along. Maybe you’ve also noticed shiny oil floating on the surface of water puddles after it rains. In both cases you understand that water and oil don’t go well together—but have you ever wondered why? So many other things can dissolve in water—why not oil?...

In February, President Barack Obama hinted that the White House would soon announce a large-scale initiative aimed at mapping the activity in the brain at the cellular level. Several scientists confirmed the project would probably be based on the Brain Activity Map proposal outlined in Neuron in June 2012. Scientific American Mind asked a few top neuroscientists what they think. Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University and an adviser for the White House’s initiative: The Brain Activity Map could advance our knowledge by providing an unprecedented view into the large-scale activity of different parts of the brain of experimental animals—and hopefully also humans....

WASHINGTON, Dec 19 (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama said on Friday that construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast would only nominally benefit American consumers and workers in perhaps his strongest comments on the Canada-to-U.S. pipeline to date. “There is very little impact - nominal impact - on U.S. gas prices, what the average American consumer cares about,” Obama told reporters during an end-of-year press conference....

In the Northwest Pacific, already a hotspot for tropical cyclones, the storms that strike East and Southeast Asia have been intensifying more than those that stay out at sea over the last four decades, a new study finds. The proportion of landfalling storms that reach Category 4 or 5 strength—the storms that wreak the most damage, as recent examples like 2013’s devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan show—has doubled and even tripled in some areas of the basin, researchers found....