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The presidents of the world’s two most polluting nations agree: something should be done about climate change. And they’re just the leaders to do it, per the terms of what President Barack Obama called a “historic agreement” announced November 12 between the U.S. and China. Although neither country has plans to stop burning coal or oil in the near future, both countries now have commitments to reduce the greenhouse gases that result....

Jeremy Jones, chief of the navigation team for the Cassini Project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offers this explanation. The accurate navigation of space probes depends on four factors: First is the measurement system for determining the position and speed of a probe. Second is the location from which the measurements are taken. Third is an accurate model of the solar system, and fourth, models of the motion of a probe....

Reprinted from Are We Getting Smarter? Rising IQ in the Twenty-First Century, by James R. Flynn. Copyright © 2012 James R. Flynn. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. The phenomenon of IQ gains has created unnecessary controversy because of conceptual confusion. Imagine an archaeologist from the distant future who excavates our civilization and finds a record of performances over time on measures of marksmanship. The test is always the same, that is, how many bullets you can put in a target 100 meters away in a minute....

IN GORDIUM in the fourth century B.C., an oxcart was roped to a pole with a complex knot, and it was said that the first person to untie it would become the king of Asia. Unfortunately, the knot proved impossible to untie. Legend has it that when confronted with this problem, rather than deliberating on how to untie the knot, Alexander simply took his sword and cut it in two—then went on to conquer Asia....

Carbon dioxide levels climbing toward a doubling of the 280 parts per million (ppm) concentration found in the preindustrial atmosphere pose the question: What impact will this increased greenhouse gas load have on the climate? If relatively small changes in CO2 levels have big effects—meaning that we live in a more sensitive climate system—the planet could warm by as much as 6 degrees Celsius on average with attendant results such as changed weather patterns and sea-level rise....

Over the grand sweep of time, sediments carried down from continents by mighty rivers like the Mississippi have built vast deltas of land and marsh along coastlines. But for a century the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has built levees along the Mississippi, which have prevented the land-creating sediment in the muddy water from spreading across the delta, starving wetlands of nutrients and raw material. That’s why Louisiana’s 2012 Coastal Master Plan to rebuild the state’s vanishing coastal wetlands relies on cutting gaps in the levees, diverting water and sediment so that the land-building material flows again across parts of the landscape....

“Have a look at that dark purple blob on the left, there.” With those words, scientists aboard the Exploration Vessel Nautilus uncovered a marine mystery: a small purple orb tucked halfway under a rock off the coast of California. Researchers are so far stumped as to what the colorful, bumpy little ball might be. Their best guess is that it might be a gastropod (a mollusk such as a snail or slug that belongs to the class Gastropoda) called a pleurobranch — and possibly a new species....

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives (Free Press, 2010) by science writer Annie Murphy Paul. It chronicles her own pregnancy as well as her quest to find the latest science behind how environment—physical, chemical and biological—can shape a person for decades to come. During the fourth month of her pregnancy, she assesses the growing—but still incomplete—knowledge base about all of the everyday medications that can cross the placental boundary and impact prenatal development....

The first California condors to enter the wild in five years took a few hesitant hops on a sandstone cliff, craned pinkish necks over the pre­c­ipice and tentatively tested their nine-foot-plus wings. Since that landmark launch in 1992, wildlife biologists have released nearly 200 condors that were born and raised in captivity, and they’ve prospered. The world population has rebounded from 22 in 1987 to 396 birds, with wild populations concentrated in Baja California, Arizona, and southern and central California....

The risk of catastrophic climate change is getting worse, according to a new study from scientists involved with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Threats—ranging from the destruction of coral reefs to more extreme weather events like hurricanes, droughts and floods—are becoming more likely at the temperature change already underway: as little as 1.8 degree Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) of warming in global average temperatures. “Most people thought that the risks were going to be for certain species and poor people....

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazineThe non-profit programme MyMicrobes, launched today, is inviting people to have their gut bacteria sequenced for about €1,500 (2,100). Acting as both social network and DNA database, the website offers a place for people to share diet tips, stories and gastrointestinal woes with one another. In exchange, researchers hope to gather a wealth of data about the bacteria living in people’s guts.The same team of researchers showed earlier this year that people fall into one of three groups, or ’enterotypes’, when it comes to the genetics of their gut bacteria (see ‘Gut study divides people into three types’)....

The region around Lake Turkana in northern Kenya is a desert landscape. To a Californian, the look of the hills and rocks and washes is familiar even if the vegetation is not. Bumping along in a land cruiser, we must have crossed a half dozen dry riverbeds. Their size made it clear that, at least some of the time, water could be present—and violent. Like stormwater in the desert, time has many aspects....

The Twitter account’s display name read “National Weather Service.” The avatar was the National Weather Service (NWS) logo, and the handle was “@NWSGOV.” Crucially, the name was followed by the blue check mark that had been used to confirm an account was run by the person or organization it indicated. Only by clicking over to @NWSGOV’s full profile could one could see that it had just joined Twitter—and that the biography field noted it was a parody of the NWS, whose real account is @NWS....

In a remarkable twist in the story line of early human evolution, scientists have announced the discovery of “Denisova 11”—a female who was at least 13 years old, lived more than 50,000 years ago and was a child of mixed parentage. Her parents were not just of different races, but two different and now-extinct early human types. Their exact taxonomic designations—whether they were separate species or subspecies—is still a matter of scientific debate....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Slavery in Colonial America, defined as white English settlers enslaving Africans, began in 1640 in the Jamestown Colony of Virginia but had already been embraced as policy prior to that date with the enslavement and deportation of Native Americans. Although the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, chattel slavery was not institutionalized at that time....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In the aftermath of the failure of the Second Crusade (1147-1149 CE), which only managed to bring Damascus under Nur ad-Din’s (sometimes also given as Nur al-Din, l. 1118-1174 CE) dominion, Egypt acquired top priority – both from a strategic and economic point of view, for the Crusaders and the Zengids (Oghuz Turkic rulers of regions in Syria and Iraq)....

Do antidepressants “cure” depression? No, says Joanna Moncrieff, a psychiatrist at University College London—no more so than insulin “cures” diabetes or alcohol “cures” social anxiety. Moncrieff, who has published several critical studies of psychiatric drugs in leading medical journals, advocates a “drug-centered” rather than “disease-centered” model for understanding psychoactive medication. “Instead of relieving a hypothetical biochemical abnormality,” she says, antidepressants themselves cause “abnormal brain states,” which may coincidentally relieve psychiatric symptoms....

An electric insulator, in the simplest terms, blocks the flow of electric current. So it would be a bit counterintuitive, to say the least, if a current on one side of an insulator could produce voltage on the other. But that is precisely what a group of Japanese researchers has found, as detailed in a study in the March 11 issue of Nature. The electric current induces a collective excitation in the magnetic insulator that can travel relatively long distances before unloading its momentum to generate a voltage when it reaches an electric conductor....

In 1989, surgery for detached retinas left Gilbert Lonzarich blind for a month. Rather than feel shaken or depressed, the condensed-matter physicist at the University of Cambridge, UK, seized the opportunity, inviting his graduate students to his house to share with them how exciting it was to adapt to life without sight. Lonzarich’s embrace of the experience perfectly captures his approach to life, says Andrew Mackenzie, then one of those students and now a director at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in Dresden, Germany....

LA JOLLA, Calif.—As her father lay dying of sepsis, Janelle Ayres spent nine agonizing days at his bedside. When he didn’t beat the virulent bloodstream infection, she grieved. And then she got frustrated. She knew there had to be a better way to help patients like her dad. In fact, she was working on one in her lab. Ayres, a hard-charging physiologist who has unapologetically decorated her lab with bright touches of hot pink, is intent on upending our most fundamental understanding of how the human body fights disease....