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The international treaty that saved the Earth’s ozone layer is often considered one of the most successful environmental efforts in history. Now there’s evidence it did more than just preserve a critical shield for the planet. The 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer effectively phased out the use of chlorofluorocarbons—a powerful, ozone-eating industrial chemical—and the once-notorious Antarctic “ozone hole” they created is in recovery. Eventually, the ozone layer is expected to return to its original condition....

Scientists are fond of saying negative results are just as important as positive results, but after several decades of not finding something, researchers can be forgiven for feeling impatient. Back in the 1990s, experiments began trying to detect the particles that make up dark matter, the ubiquitous yet untouchable invisible material that apparently fills the cosmos. Since then, physicists have found more and more evidence that dark matter is real but not a single sign of the stuff itself....

The 2011 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded today to Saul Perlmutter at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Brian Schmidt at the Australian National Lab and Adam Reiss at Johns Hopkins University for their discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. “In a universe which is dominated by matter, one would expect gravity eventually should make the expansion slow down, the Royal Swedish Academy’s Olga Botner said this morning at the announcement event in Stockholm....

Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free. SpaceX’s billionaire founder and CEO just published the plan, which he unveiled at a conference in Mexico in September 2016, in the journal New Space. Musk’s commentary, titled “Making Humanity a Multi-Planetary Species,” is available for free on New Space’s website through July 5. “In my view, publishing this paper provides not only an opportunity for the spacefaring community to read the SpaceX vision in print with all the charts in context, but also serves as a valuable archival reference for future studies and planning,” New Space editor-in-chief (and former NASA “Mars czar”) Scott Hubbard wrote in a statement....

Wind and waves battered the northern European coastline last week in the worst gale in more than half a century. At the storm’s peak, a wind gust of 142 mph was recorded just outside of Fort William in the Scottish Highlands. Parts of Scotland, northern England, the Netherlands, southern Sweden and Germany experienced the worst tidal surge since the catastrophic storm of January 1953. That tempest left 307 London residents dead and 40,000 homeless....

President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for the 2015 fiscal year seems destined to please no one. The $3.9-trillion plan, released on 4 March, exceeds the spending limit approved for the year by Congress by about $56 billion, drawing quick rebukes from lawmakers. But it also proposes almost flat budgets for key research agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), which has disappointed science advocates....

On a brisk August night Dortheus Mentansan slipped into the calm ocean in a wood outrigger canoe with a lantern tied to the bow. A slight, solemn man with the precise paddle stroke that comes from 30 years of practice, Dortheus counts himself as a descendant of the original clan that settled here in the Mayalibit Bay region of Indonesia’s remote Raja Ampat islands. Clouds blocked the moon, but Dortheus had no trouble navigating....

(Reuters) - Voters in the U.S. capital and two West Coast states will decide on Tuesday during national midterm elections whether to legalize marijuana in a test for broader cannabis legalization efforts across the United States. Ballot measures in Oregon and Alaska would set up a network of regulated pot shops, similar to those already operating in Colorado and Washington state after twin landmark votes in 2012. A measure in the District of Columbia would allow possession but not retail sales....

A woman’s diet at the time of conception might cause lasting changes in the DNA of her children, potentially influencing their development, researchers say. In a new study, researchers analyzed the diets of women in rural parts of The Gambia, in western Africa, who experience major changes in their diets over the course of each year as the area goes through rainy seasons and dry seasons. “The rainy season is often referred to as ’the hungry season,’ and the dry season ’the harvest season,’” said study author Robert Waterland, a nutritional epigeneticist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston....

Researchers from IBM’s Zurich Research Lab and Switzerland’s ETH Zurich science and technology university today announced the development of a dramatic new printing process that can manipulate nanosize particles to create larger images. The new technology promises to allow scientists, medical professionals and technologists to for the first time place particles smaller than 100 nanometers precisely where they are needed. The process, which likely will not be commercially available for several years, is expected to have the most dramatic impact in the fields of biomedicine, electronics and information technology....

While most of the U.S. slept, a once menacing asteroid drew close to Earth on its usual rounds through the inner solar system. The 300-meter asteroid, known as Apophis, kept a comfortable distance on January 9, flying well beyond the orbit of the moon. But Apophis has not drawn so near to Earth since 2004, when it was first discovered—and when it was briefly feared to be on a possible collision course with our planet....

“Go ahead and pick one up if you like.” It was 1996. In front of me was a box of fossils, many millions of years old. I was visiting the laboratory of Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist, while reporting a feature article. Reaching in, I lifted a sepia-tinted bone, about six inches long and blade-shaped. It was oddly heavy in my hand from the mineralization that had occurred over millennia....

Despite modest gains in fuel efficiency, domestic airlines continue to pump larger and larger quantities of planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere. Airlines increased their fuel efficiency by 3 percent on average last year, according to a new report from the International Council on Clean Transportation. But overall, the gains were not enough to offset rising greenhouse gas emissions from the domestic industry, which released 7 percent more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than last year....

By Stephanie Nebehay GENEVA (Reuters) - Efforts to stamp out West Africa’s Ebola epidemic are being thwarted by villagers touching and washing the infectious bodies of dead victims at secret burials and difficulty in tracing those exposed to the virus, U.N. officials said on Thursday. The number of new cases rose for the first time this year in the past week, coinciding with a looming funding shortfall and the approach of the rainy season that will hamper aid efforts from April, they warned....

At the height of the 1920s, two forces were on the rise: science and spiritualism. In his book The Witch of Lime Street, David Jaher chronicles how spiritualism, the belief that you could communicate with the soul after death, came to the United States. Jaher focuses on a contest held by Scientific American that set skeptical famed escape artist Harry Houdini against the compelling spirit medium Mina Crandon, nicknamed Margery. Scientific American wanted to use the contest to determine if there was any science that supported spirit mediums....

The Minecraft video game was familiar to José Hernández-Orallo long before he started using it for his own research. The computer scientist, who devises ways to benchmark machine intelligence at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain, first watched his own children play inside the 3D virtual world, which focuses on solving problems rather than shooting monsters. In 2014, Microsoft bought Minecraft, and its science arm, Microsoft Research, gave its own researchers access to a new version of the game that allowed computer programs, as well as people, to explore and customize the 3D environment....

The United States and China are launching a joint Clean Energy Research Center aimed at bolstering research and development of technologies to improve energy efficiency, carbon sequestration and low-emissions vehicles. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who is in China with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke for energy discussions, announced the effort in Beijing with Chinese Minister of Science Wan Gang and Administrator of National Energy Administration Zhang Guo Bao, according to the Energy Department....

By Aubrey BelfordCABUNGAAN, Philippines (Reuters) - Mobbed by hungry villagers, U.S. military helicopters dropped desperately needed aid into remote areas of the typhoon-ravaged central Philippines, as survivors of the disaster flocked to ruined churches on Sunday to pray for their uncertain future.The Philippines is facing up to an enormous rebuilding task from Typhoon Haiyan, which killed at least 3,974 people and left 1,186 missing, with many isolated communities yet to receive significant aid despite a massive international relief effort....

The protagonist of the novel Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks is an only child named Cadel Piggott who has an unusual gift for creative thinking and problem solving. Through his creative instincts, he creates a fictional world based on evil, full of embezzlement, fraud, disguises, and computer hacking. The image of the “evil genius” is a pervasive one, found in movies, novels, comic books, and the popular media. In the 1927 movie Metropolis, Fritz Lang brought this archetype to the silver screen in the form of Rotwang, the scientist whose machines gave life to the dystopian city of the title....

Plenty of us have felt the lifeless lull of a dragging workday — the monotony of cubicles and computer screens; the crawl of afternoon meetings; the tedious repetition that has you channeling Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day.” Maniacally checking Facebook would be the obvious antidote. But, according to a new study, you might want to consider another option: walking. A new study suggests that taking just a few lunch hour walks each week can have marked benefits on our mood while on the job....