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Editor’s note: This Q&A is a part of a survey conducted by Scientific American of executives at companies engaged in developing and implementing non–fossil fuel energy technologies. What technical obstacles currently most curtail the growth of wind power? What are the prospects for overcoming them in the near future and the longer-term? Whether they are built on land or at sea, nearly all wind turbines have the same technical issues related to the fact that wind is naturally variable....

An ultrapowerful supernova discovered in 2006 may blow its top again. Burning 100 times brighter than a typical supernova, SN 2006gy maintained full strength for an amazing three months. To explain the massive outburst, researchers invoked a mechanism called pair instability, in which high-energy gamma rays inside the star convert into pairs of electrons and positrons, draining stellar energy that would normally help maintain its internal pressure. That sapping leads to a premature collapse, liberating vast amounts of energy and light....

Much has changed in the modern electric power plant since Thomas Edison’s era, but the parts that actually turn heat into electrons haven’t changed since his eureka moments. Whether burning coal, concentrating sunlight or splitting atoms, most thermal power plants use the energy for the same thing: heating water into steam to drive a turbine. Steam-based generation produces 80 percent of the world’s electricity. After more than a century of incremental improvements in the steam cycle, engineers have plucked most of the low-hanging fruit and are chasing diminishing returns, spending millions of dollars for every percentage point of efficiency improvement....

The 21st century has witnessed the reinvention of the electric car. First popular in the waning days of the 19th century, the major manufacturers like General Motors and Nissan rebooted the electric car with the Volt and LEAF, respectively. In 2014 at least 17 electric cars—whether plug-in hybrids or all-electric vehicles—are available for purchase. And yet sales over the last decade of all models total slightly more than 200,000 cars in the U....

This spring, as the COVID-19 pandemic led people to hunker down at home, outdoor air quality improved dramatically in many cities and countries. In the northeastern U.S., for instance, air pollution dropped by 30 percent. But the lockdowns might be having the opposite effect indoors. In March Airthings, an Oslo-based manufacturer of smart air-quality monitors, noticed conditions beginning to deteriorate in many customers’ homes that it tracks. Between early March and early May, levels of carbon dioxide and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) increased by 15 to 30 percent in more than 1,000 homes across several European countries, the company says....

SPANISH PAINTER EL GRECO often depicted elongated human figures and objects in his work. Some art historians have suggested that he might have been astigmatic—that is, his eyes’ corneas or lenses may have been more curved horizontally than vertically, causing the image on the retina at the back of the eye to be stretched vertically. But surely this idea is absurd. If it were true, then we should all be drawing the world upside down, because the retinal image is upside down!...

Although experts recently declared the world’s largest Ebola outbreak over, many people who were infected with the virus are still experiencing neurologic problems, according to a new study. Researchers found that, among a group of 82 Ebola survivors in Liberia, nearly all had some neurologic problems at six months or longer after they were infected. “While an end to the outbreak has been declared, these survivors are still struggling with long-term problems,” study author Dr....

Reid had been drinking hard since 1994, when sickness, his father’s death and business troubles had him reaching for more alcohol than usual. Eventually he was knocking back 10 or more drinks a day. In 2009 his family leveled an ultimatum. He had to give up alcohol or get out. “That choice sounds real simple, but it’s very, very hard,” says the 58-year-old college-educated businessman, whose last name has been withheld....

They must all be 20. Any of the other statistics would reveal this fact for sure. The mean would be enough to determine how many 20s and how many 21s there are. For example, if there are three 20s and two 21s, then the mean would be 20.4. Knowing the median would not be enough because a median of 20 for example could result in a situation in which there are three 20s and one 21 or four 20s and one 21....

EarthTalk® E - The Environmental Magazine Dear EarthTalk: Some green groups are promoting the simple notion of sharing as a way to green communities and combat waste. Can you explain?—Becky Lipscomb, Centereach, N.Y. The convergence of environmental awareness and consumer culture has created a whole new movement today whereby sharing is cool. Indeed, some environmentalists view sharing as key to maintaining our quality of life and our sanity in an increasingly cluttered world....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). Proteins have generally taken a back seat to RNA molecules in scientists’ speculations about how life on Earth started. Yet a new computational model that describes how early biopolymers could have grown long enough to fold into useful shapes may change that. If it holds up, the model, which is now guiding laboratory experiments for confirmation, could re-establish the reputation of proteins as the original self-replicating biomolecule....

When Andrey Rzhetsky arrived at Columbia University as a research scientist in 1996, the first project he collaborated on involved a literature search to try to understand why white blood cells called lymphocytes do not die in chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The mathematician-biologist found a few hundred articles on apoptosis (programmed cell death) and the cancer. Even if he had devoted every moment to the task, it would have been impossible to perform a comprehensive scan of everything that had reached the journals....

By Carina Dennis of Nature magazineMouse ‘avatars’ could in future allow physicians to find the most effective cocktail of cancer drugs to combat a particular tumor before giving them to a patient, according to researchers at the annual meeting of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) in Australia last week.“Using a personalized cancer avatar makes it possible to try out different combinations and make some mistakes before going into the clinic,” says Edison Liu, president of HUGO and head of the Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor in Maine....

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Russia is ready to discuss extending the life of the International Space Station (ISS) to 2028, said Igor Komarov, director general of the Russian national space agency, Roscosmos. Here at the 33rd annual Space Symposium yesterday (April 4), Komarov spoke about the need to maintain a research station in low Earth orbit if humans hope to eventually travel to Mars. He also discussed the agency’s plans to send a new module to the space station in 2018, when the agency will also re-add a third crew member to the station....

Scientists across the country are increasingly interested in communicating directly with the public, media and elected officials in the wake of President Trump’s inauguration. Crackdowns on external communications at a number of federal agencies, including U.S. EPA and the Interior and Agriculture departments, have alarmed outside observers, who are in turn putting pressure on scientists to speak up. “We’re all concerned we may be watching a federal lobotomy,” California Energy Commission Chairman Bob Weisenmiller told several hundred scientists and policymakers gathered in Sacramento yesterday for the state’s Climate Change Symposium....

Some ideas are discovered late in the history of a scientific discipline because they are subtle, complex or otherwise difficult. Natural selection was not one of these. Although compared with other revolutionary scientific ideas it was discovered fairly recently—Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace wrote on the subject in 1858, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species appeared in 1859—the idea of natural selection is simplicity itself. Some kinds of organisms survive better in certain conditions than others do; such organisms leave more progeny and so become more common with time....

The English had the longbow. The Spanish had steel. Tawny crazy ants have their own formidable weapon—a protective acid sheath—that protects them against fire ant enemies. The revelation comes from a new study published this week. Named for their butterscotch color and erratic movements, tawny crazy ants are the newest insect invaders sprawling throughout Texas and the Gulf states, unseating the reigning imported fire ants that have infested the region. Teeming out of electrical outlets and short-circuiting electronics, the tiny reddish-brown crazy ants have been making headlines as their numbers climb in the southeastern U....

NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston will remain closed through Labor Day as a result of Tropical Storm Harvey, agency officials said. NASA shuttered JSC to everyone except “essential personnel” on Aug. 25, the day that Harvey slammed into the Texas coast as a Category 4 hurricane. Though Harvey has since been downgraded to a tropical storm, it has lingered, continuing to drench southeastern Texas and southern Louisiana with record-breaking rain that has caused catastrophic flooding....

Asthma rates have been surging around the globe over the past three decades, and for a long time researchers thought they had a good idea of what might be fueling the increase: the world we live in is just a little too clean. According to this notion—known as the hygiene hypothesis—exposure in early childhood to infectious agents programs the immune system to mount differing highly effective defenses against disease-causing viruses, bacteria and parasites....

Recently, at a wedding reception, I polled some friends about immortality. Suppose you could upload your brain tomorrow and live forever as a human-machine hybrid, I asked an overeducated couple from San Francisco, parents of two young daughters. Would you do it? The husband, a 42-year-old M.D.-Ph.D., didn’t hesitate before answering yes. His current research, he said, would likely bear fruit over the next several centuries, and he wanted to see what would come of it....