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At the end of An Inconvenient Truth, the well-received documentary about global warming that appeared in theaters this past summer, the filmmakers provided a list of practical steps that anyone can take to tackle this looming environmental problem. Perhaps the most memorable suggestion was this one: “Vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis. Write to Congress. If they don’t listen, run for Congress.” Unfortunately, the federal government is lagging behind other nations in the effort to control climate-warming gases–so now state lawmakers are taking the lead....

By Sharon Bernstein SACRAMENTO, April 1 (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown, acting in the face of a devastating, multiyear drought, ordered the first statewide mandatory water restrictions on Wednesday, directing cities and communities to reduce usage by 25 percent. Brown, who made the announcement at a ski resort in the Sierra Nevada mountains, said the move, which comes as California reports its lowest snowpack levels on record, would save some 1....

Dear EarthTalk: Are the United States’ vast oil shale resources a potential source of energy? – Larry LeDoux, Honolulu, HI Oil shale is a fine-grained sedimentary rock that contains significant amounts of kerogen, a solid mixture of organic chemical compounds that can be converted into synthetic liquid fuel similar to oil, or into shale gas similar to petroleum-derived natural gas. Geologists believe there is more oil shale out there in the rocks of the world—three trillion barrels worth of fuel—than there is oil in existing reserves globally....

It may be tempting to seek solace in slumber after a traumatic event, but a study from the October 2012 issue of Neuropsychopharmacology found that sleeping too soon after trauma might lead to increased post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. Two groups of rodents were exposed to a predator’s scent, a traumatic event for a mouse. For six hours afterward, one group was prevented from sleeping, whereas a control group was not. The sleep-deprivation group displayed fewer physiological markers of stress than the control group and less PTSD-like behavior, such as freezing and a heightened startle response....

Fossils of a human species new to science could be the direct ancestor of our genus, Homo. Discovered in Malapa Cave, located some 40 kilometers outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, the finds comprise two partial skeletons that are nearly 1.95 million years old. The researchers have named them Australopithecus sediba. The pair—an adult female and juvenile male that may have been mother and son—appear to have fallen through a hole in the cave ceiling while possibly attempting to access a pool of water inside....

On March 11, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Sendai in Japan, knocking out power at the nearby Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. In the hours and days that followed, three of the plant’s six reactors melted down, triggering a series of explosions and fires at the site. Six months later, what progress has been made to stabilize the plant, and what is yet to be done? What is happening at the site right now?...

Alphabet Inc.’s Google, whose physical headquarters is in Mountain View, Calif., but whose digital footprint extends across the globe, said it now has commitments to purchase 2.6 gigawatts of electricity under long-term contracts with renewable energy providers. That’s up from 2 GW a year ago. “That’s bigger than many large utilities and more than twice as much as the 1.21 gigawatts it took to send Marty McFly back in time,” Google Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure Urs Hölzle said in a statement, referencing the 1985 blockbuster movie “Back to the Future....

Black holes have been a part of popular culture for decades now, most recently playing a central role in the plot of this year’s Star Trek movie. No wonder. These dark remnants of collapsed stars seem almost designed to play on some of our primal fears: a black hole harbors unfathomable mystery behind the curtain that is its “event horizon,” admits of no escape for anyone or anything that falls within, and irretrievably destroys all it ingests....

Call them the Silicon Valley garages of climate policy. Local efforts to trim emissions, change economies and alter behavior are serving as idea labs where mistakes can be made and novel approaches honed in preparation for setting national climate and energy policy. These ideas can have a powerful influence in the climate debate, say policy experts: Within the recently released climate bill are many lessons learned in these local laboratories. And as discussion in Congress intensifies, many lawmakers will find themselves pushed by proponents of these municipal efforts to extend their reach to the national stage....

Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave Adam Alter Penguin Press, 2013 ($20) At the 2004 Summer Olympics, researchers asked six athletes in different sports to wear red uniforms instead of their usual more subdued colors. All of them won gold. Although the color red, associated with sex, dominance and aggression, did not convey magical powers, it may have provided subconscious cues to the athletes and their opponents that swayed the outcome of the competition....

A team of chemists has unraveled the process by which a complex nanoscale structure self-assembles, finding that a wheel-shaped molybdenum oxide molecule takes shape with the help of a transient scaffold at its center. The researchers describe the formation process of these molybdenum oxide wheels in the January 1 issue of Science. Although the basic ingredients needed to spur the self-assembly of the nanowheels were known, the actual mechanism of their growth “was really a complete mystery,” says study co-author Lee Cronin, a chemist at the University of Glasgow....

NASA’s newest space telescope will face 29 “harrowing” days after launch as it makes its way to a deep-space destination nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth, the agency says in a new YouTube video. The video, called “29 Days on the Edge,” was released Monday (Oct. 18). It focuses on the journey and 50 expected deployments the James Webb Space Telescope will undergo after its expected launch on Dec....

Trevor Goward lets me lead, so we travel through the mixed forest at my pace. This is a nod to his rangy 6′5″ figure and the rapid strides he makes across barely discernible deer and bear paths on his land adjacent to Wells Gray Provincial Park in British Columbia. But mostly he is making space for my observations, my innate way of experiencing the landscape. What engages me? How do I see?...

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) should dismantle a decades-old colony of 360 chimpanzees, retiring all but roughly 50 of the animals to a national sanctuary, the biomedical agency was told on 22 January in a long-awaited report. The report, from a working group of external agency advisors, also counsels the NIH to end about half of 21 existing biomedical and behavioral experiments, saying they do not meet criteria established in a December, 2011 Institute of Medicine (IOM) report....

A cold wind is blowing across the landscape of privacy. The twin imperatives of technological advancement and coun­terterrorism have led to dramatic and possibly irreversible changes in what people can expect to remain of private life. Nearly 10 years ago Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems famously pronounced the death of privacy. “Get over it,” he said. Some people, primarily those younger than about 25, claim to have done just that, embracing its antithesis, total public disclosure....

T-ray Vision In principle, terahertz radiation—which lies between the microwave and infrared segments of the electromagnetic spectrum—could help people safely peer through flesh, plastic, fabrics and ceramics to detect anomalies, from tumors to bombs, for medical or security applications. But for decades, so-called t-ray devices were impractical outside the lab because they were fragile and because they weighed 45 kilograms (100 pounds) or more. Yet after just a few months of work, Brian Schulkin of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created a rugged t-ray imager dubbed the “Mini-Z” that is less than 2....

In fall 1976 the first recorded Ebola outbreak ravaged a small village in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire). The virus, named for the river valley where it was found, causes a deadly hemorrhagic fever. It spread quickly via contact with blood and contaminated needles killing nearly 90 percent of the 318 villagers it infected. Since then about 2,300 human cases have been reported, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 85 percent of which were fatal....

In the silk business, sex is money. Male silkworms weave cocoons with more silk of a higher quality than females do, and the multibillion dollar sericulture industry has long sought an easy way to breed only males. That might now be a realistic goal, as researchers have identified the process that determines sex in the silkworm Bombyx mori. The sex factor is found to be a small RNA molecule — the first time that anything other than a protein has been implicated in a sex-detemination process....

Guppies make unassuming pets, but in the wild they adopt a daring and counterintuitive tactic to avoid becoming dinner. When they spot a predator, they suddenly darken their eyes from silver to jet black—enticing the attacker to go straight for the guppy’s head. In a paper published in July in Current Biology, researchers report that this seemingly bizarre behavior may be a diversion that helps guppies dodge would-be hunters. Robert Heathcote, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter in England, says he came up with this hypothesis while eating a blueberry muffin on a train....

The day I meet Sonja Lyubomirsky, she keeps getting calls from her Toyota Prius dealer. When she finally picks up, she is excited by the news: she can buy the car she wants in two days. Lyubomirsky wonders if her enthusiasm might come across as materialism, but I understand that she is buying an experience as much as a possession. The hybrid will be gentler on the environment, and a California state law letting some hybrids use the carpool lane promises a faster commute between her coastal Santa Monica home and her job at the University of California, Riverside, some 70 miles inland....