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By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and Canada agreed joint steps on Thursday to fight climate change, including cutting methane emissions from oil and gas operations and signing last year’s Paris climate deal “as soon as feasible.” The agreement came as Canada’s new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Barack Obama met at the White House. Methane, which can leak from pipelines and valves, is a powerful greenhouse gas, with up to 80 times the potential of carbon dioxide to trap the planet’s heat....

ONE OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK’S most enduring bits of cinematic comedy is the auction scene in the espionage thriller North by Northwest. Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a businessman who has been mistaken for a CIA agent by the ruthless Phillip Vandamm. At a critical juncture, Thornhill is cornered by his enemies inside a Chicago auction house, and the only way he can escape is by drawing attention to himself. When the bidding on an antique reaches $2,250, Thornhill yells out, “Fifteen hundred!...

Did you like this interview? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In this interview, James Blake Wiener, Co-Founder and Communications Director at Ancient History Encyclopedia (AHE), speaks to Emeritus Professor James H. Grayson, Professor of Korean Studies at the University of Sheffield, about the historical and cultural impact of Buddhism in Korea through an anthropological lens. Dr. Grayson’s research interests lie in two main areas, the diffusion of religion across cultural boundaries, and an analysis of the religious and intellectual conceptual framework of the Korean and East Asian peoples....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, also known as the Olympieion, was built over several centuries starting in 174 BCE and only finally completed by Roman emperor Hadrian in 131 CE. Its unusually tall columns and ambitious layout made the temple one of the largest ever built in the ancient world....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Lycian Way follows over 540km (335 miles) of ancient roadways, mule tracks and shepherds’ paths along one of Turkey’s most remote and untouched coastlines. Theresa Thompson discovers the joys of following the trail and finding the ancient Lycians at the same time. It was Lycia that clinched it for me....

1972 No Life on the Moon “It seems increasingly likely that we are not alone in the universe. There may be millions of inhabited planets like our own. It is a prime goal of science to search for life or its remnants elsewhere. The samples returned from the moon have provided the first opportunity to test our life-detection methods on samples that have been carefully collected and protected from terrestrial contamination, thereby avoiding the bitter controversy surrounding the analysis of meteorites....

The climate movement is ascendant, and it has become common to see climate change as a social justice issue. Climate change and its effects—pandemics, pollution, natural disasters—are not universally or uniformly felt: the people and communities suffering most are disproportionately Black, Indigenous and people of color. It is no surprise then that U.S. surveys show that these are the communities most concerned about climate change. One year ago, I published a book called A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety....

Global precipitation patterns are being moved in new directions by climate change, a new study has found. The research, published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first study to find the signal of climate change in global precipitation shifts across land and ocean. “It’s worth saying that this is another grain of sand on that vast pile of evidence that climate change is real and is occurring,” said study co-author Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory....

Imagine that you go to City Hall for a construction permit to renovate your house. The employee who receives your form says that because of the great number of applications the office has received, the staff will take up to nine months to issue the permit—but if you give her $100, your form will make it to the top of the pile. You realize she has just asked for a bribe: an illicit payment to obtain preferential treatment....

Tasmanian devils are losing a hellish battle: A contagious cancer—called devil facial tumor disease—is spreading across their island home, their last bastion of safety from human encroachment. Populations of this carnivorous marsupial have declined in parts of Tasmania by as much as 95 percent, and the species is now officially endangered. Only animals in the far northwest of the island seem to show some resistance to the malady. Scientists in the field are examining population sizes, behavior changes, immunology and genetics with the aim of helping to forestall extinction....

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazineDiscovered 80 years ago this month, the neutron is famous for what it lacks: electric charge. Yet this is a simplification of a deeper truth. Each neutron is made of charged quarks: two down quarks that each carry a negative charge one-third as strong as an electron’s; and an up quark that carries a two-thirds positive charge.In theory, this arrangement could create an electric dipole moment (EDM)–an offset between the centres of positive and negative charge....

At 5:30 A.M. on February 19, 2010, 20-year-old Bennie F. Abram started his first day of football practice as a junior at the University of Mississippi. Several hours later he collapsed and died. Last month Abram’s family settled their wrongful-death lawsuit with Ole Miss, receiving $275,000 from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and $50,000 from the university. Later in 2010, 20-year-old Jospin Milandu and 15-year-old Oliver Louis also died unexpectedly while working out with their teams....

The scientific evidence that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) relied upon to investigate the October 2001 anthrax attacks – and ultimately identify the culprit after his suicide – was deeply flawed, according to a new report from the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO). The GAO found that the FBI lacked a comprehensive approach or framework to standardize the genetic testing used to track down the culprit. It also found that each of the FBI’s four contractors developed different tests and there was no statistical confidence for interpreting the results....

A virus is the likely culprit in a massive, ongoing die-off of sea stars along the Pacific Coast of North America, researchers report on November 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Their intense, year-long investigation has zeroed in on a densovirus (from the family Parvoviridae) that has been present in the Pacific Ocean since at least 1942. But a mystery remains: why the virus seems to have suddenly bloomed into an outbreak that has devastated marine life from Alaska to Baja California....

Hands-on with Google GlassThe next Google Glass owner who winks at you may actually be taking your picture.New code cooked up by Google Glass developer Mike DiGiovanni enables the wink gesture in the high-tech specs. (Credit:Mike DiGiovanni/Screenshot by Lance Whitney/CNET)Dubbed Winky, the feature can even be used to snap a photo when the screen is turned off. As a result, Winky eliminates the need to issue a voice command or tap a button to take a picture....

MUNCIE, Ind. – On an unusually warm day on the campus of Ball State University, Jim Lowe is giving a tour of the campus’s huge, half-completed geothermal system. Lowe, the director of engineering, construction and operations for Ball State, peppers his explanation of closed-loop systems, chilling stations and boreholes with banter on college basketball games and the history of the school, founded by the makers of Ball canning jars. “The irony is, they came here for the natural gas,” said Lowe, of the university’s founders’ arrival to Indiana to take advantage of the fuel for glassmaking....

If President Barack Obama wins re-election, his supporters may want to thank Hurricane Sandy. While voter turnout on the East Coast could be reduced as a result of the superstorm, the president may get a national bump for responding quickly to the disaster, experts say. Lower turnout “The most likely outcome is that turnout would be depressed, especially in the areas that are without power,” said Nathan Kelly, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville....

Solutions: The best solutions so far were all written by TJ Takei. Suppose there are n cubicles starting at 0 (the math is easier that way, remember?). Take the workers in the even-numbered cubicles 0, 2, 4, 6, … and have them meet their neighbors to the right in the first 10 seconds. Then have the workers in the odd-numbered cubicles 1, 3, 5, 7, … meet their neighbors to the right in the second 10 seconds....

I like evolution. It made me the man I am today. But most Americans do not accept evolution, and the percentage is even lower among conservatives. So I was surprised when, on August 27, a deputy managing editor of the National Review—a conservative magazine that has published numerous evolution deniers—cited evolutionary theory as a reason that women should vote for Willard Mitt Romney for president. Kevin D. Williamson wrote, “It is a curious scientific fact (explained in evolutionary biology by the Trivers-Willard hypothesis—Willard, notice) that high-status animals tend to have more male offspring than female offspring, which holds true across many species, from red deer to mink to Homo sap....

Very few animals have revealed an ability to consciously think about the future—behaviors such as storing food for the winter are often viewed as a function of instinct. Now a team of anthropologists at the University of Zurich has evidence that wild orangutans have the capacity to perceive the future, prepare for it and communicate those future plans to other orangutans. The researchers observed 15 dominant male orangutans in Sumatra for several years....