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SAN FRANCISCO—The Orbiting Carbon Observatory, or OCO, was designed to monitor the movement of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere starting this year, but instead it plunged into the ocean in February due to a launch malfunction. Now an instrument on another NASA probe is enabling researchers to map atmospheric CO2, and revealing that its global distribution is surprisingly uneven, with regional variations of up to 5 percent. A team of scientists presented the new CO2 data—courtesy of the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS), an instrument on board NASA’s Aqua probe—Tuesday at a meeting here of the American Geophysical Union....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Rome began as a small city on the banks of the Tiber River in Italy. The Latin tribes (also known as the Latini or Latians) inhabited the region c. 1000 BCE but the founding of the city is dated to 753 BCE. They were a patrilineal society (legitimate descent and inheritance from the father’s bloodline) who, among many other deities, worshipped the supreme the sky god Deus Pater (“Father God”) – better known as Jupiter – who was associated with horses, thunder, lightning, storms, and fire....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Battle of Wattignies was a significant battle in the War of the First Coalition, part of the wider French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802). It was fought on 15-16 October 1793 between a ragtag army of the First French Republic and a professional army of the Coalition. A French victory, the battle hindered the Coalition’s encroachment onto French soil....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Cynic philosopher, wife of Crates of Thebes (l. c. 360 – 280 BCE), and mother of his children, Hipparchia of Maroneia (l. c. 350 – 280 BCE) defied social norms in order to live her beliefs. She is all the more impressive in that she taught and wrote in Athens where women were considered second-class citizens....

On April 8, 1911, at the Leiden Cryogenic Laboratory in the Netherlands, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and his collaborators immersed a mercury capillary in liquid helium and saw the mercury’s electrical resistance drop to nothing once the temperature reached about 3 kelvins, or 3 degrees above absolute zero (around –270 Celsius). This phenomenon of “superconductivity” was one of the first quantum phenomena to be discovered, although back then quantum theory did not exist....

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan will push nuclear operators to draft plans to scrap a quarter of the country’s 48 reactors, which are either too old or too costly to upgrade to meet new standards imposed after the Fukushima disaster, the Nikkei reported on Friday. The government is betting that by forcing older units considered more vulnerable to disaster to shut down it may gain public support to restart newer units, the Nikkei reported....

By David Cyranoski Evidence that prescription drugs shrink patients’ brains would, one might think, suggest only one course of action: stop prescribing them. But the matter turns out to be much more complicated, according to research published February 7 in Archives of General Psychiatry on the effects of antipsychotic drugs in people with schizophrenia.In the past 15 years, research has indicated that people with schizophrenia have smaller cerebral volumes than the general population, and that this reduction is particularly large in ‘grey-matter’ structures, which contain the cell bodies of neurons....

Apple co-founder and chief executive Steve Jobs posted an open letter to customers on his company’s Web site today in which he says that he’s being treated for an unspecified “hormone imbalance” that has caused severe weight loss and kept him out of the public eye. Jobs’s letter is short on details, making it difficult to figure out the actual disorder that he’s battling, says Robert Lustig, professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco....

My mother used to keep a small blue glass bowl of change near the door of our house in New Delhi. When she went out, she would take a few coins as alms for the poor that one inevitably sees on the city’s streets. Given how quickly you can become desensitized to the abundance of human misery in India, I was always impressed by her unwavering adherence to this ritual. The bowl lay unused for several months as my mother battled cancer....

If you traveled across what is now North America around 75 million years ago, you would see vastly different dinosaur species everywhere you went. The dramatic variation in this period’s fossils, found throughout the western half of the continent, has long puzzled paleontologists. Some have proposed that mountains or rivers might have isolated evolving dinosaur populations, leading to greater diversity. But a new study suggests a different possibility. Part of the answer, researchers report in the journal Palaeontology, rests in what herbivorous dinosaurs were munching on....

CLIMATEWIRE | Europe’s plan to slash Russian fossil fuel imports and accelerate renewable energy production will test its ability to find the minerals, metals and other components that are needed for a dramatic shift to clean power. The plan, outlined by the European Commission Wednesday, would speed the continent toward a historic transition to wind and solar energy, while diversifying its sources of natural gas and expanding energy efficiency. But it could come at a high cost....

Something is new—under the moon, at least. Researchers have discovered a species of nocturnal ant with a unique taste for mushrooms. Many ants live symbiotically with fungi. Some even make occasional meals out of the stuff. But the newly found nomadic species, Euprenolepis procera, which roams the rainforests of Malaysia, is the only ant known whose adults rely on mushrooms—the fruiting bodies of fungi—as their primary source of food. And eat fungi they do, voraciously consuming a smorgasbord of mushroom species, in one observed instance downing an entire 1....

Humanity has begun collectively grappling with the dangers of global threats such as climate change. But few authorities are planning for catastrophic solar storms—gigantic eruptions of mass and energy from the sun that disrupt Earth’s magnetic field. In a recent preprint paper, two Harvard University scientists estimate the potential economic damage from such an event will increase in the future and could equal the current U.S. GDP—about $20 trillion—150 years from now....

It’s a deal. The Paris Agreement on climate change is expected to meet all criteria to enter into force Wednesday when the European Union submits its ratification papers to the United Nations. The move brings to a close an effort by the Obama administration, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and others to set the global climate deal into motion before key leadership in certain countries—most obviously the United States—changes hands. In finally moving the deal over the finish line that called for 55 countries totaling 55 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, European leaders sought to reassert their climate leadership after months of internal wrangling....

OSLO, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Global warming has been going on for so long that most people were not even born the last time the Earth was cooler than average in 1985 in a shift that is altering perceptions of a “normal” climate, scientists said. Decades of climate change bring risks that people will accept higher temperatures, with more heatwaves, downpours and droughts, as normal and complicate government plans to do more to cut emissions of greenhouse gas emissions....

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of five features on carbon capture and storage, running daily from April 6 to April 10, 2009. Human activity results in the emission of some 30 billion metric tons of climate change–causing carbon dioxide (CO2) per year. About half of the greenhouse gas is absorbed by the world’s oceans and plants, among other natural processes, but the rest lingers in the atmosphere for a century or more, driving up annual CO2 concentrations by around two parts per million (ppm)....

Hi! I’m Everyday Einstein, Sabrina Stierwalt, bringing you Quick and Dirty Tips to help you make sense of science. Our universe is 13.8 billion years old, a timescale much longer than the more relatable spans of hundreds or thousands of years that impact our lived experiences. So how do astronomers arrive at such an enormous number? Ancient Stars The universe, quite simply, must at least be as old as the oldest thing we can find in it....

Upright Behavior Our two-legged life may have originated in the trees, say researchers who spotted numerous instances of wild Sumatran orangutans walking in the trees. In some 90 percent of those instances, the apes walked with straight legs while using their hands to maintain balance. This simian sauntering suggests that, contrary to previous thinking, bipedalism could have begun before our ancestors descended from the canopy, which would explain fossil evidence of upright behavior dating back from before chimpanzees and humans split....

Schizophrenia is a devastating illness. One percent of the world’s population suffers from its symptoms of hallucinations, psychosis and impaired cognitive ability. The disease destroys relationships and renders many of its sufferers unable to hold down a job. What could cause such frightening damage to the brain? According to a growing body of research, the culprit is surprising: the flu. If you are skeptical, you are not alone. Being condemned to a lifetime of harsh antipsychotic drugs seems a far cry from a runny nose and fever....

Among the many traits that made Charles Darwin one of the greatest minds in science was his pertinacious personality. Facing a daunting problem in natural history, Darwin would obstinately chip away at it until its secrets relented. His apt description for this disposition came from an 1867 Anthony Trollope novel in which one of the characters opined: “There ain’t nowt a man can’t bear if he’ll only be dogged…. It’s dogged as does it....