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The Democratic hopefuls for president vowed to embrace forceful measures to combat climate change in their curtain-raising debate last night without explaining how they would enlist the help of Republican lawmakers needed to enact their ambitious plans. Four of the five candidates raised the climate issue in their opening statements, marking a clear contrast to the 2012 presidential election, when President Obama largely avoided the topic. One analyst described the debate as a symbol of growing Democratic confidence that climate change can win primary votes while also exposing Republicans to vulnerabilities in the general election....

For most of us, the idea that civilization itself could disintegrate probably seems preposterous. Who would not find it hard to think seriously about such a complete departure from what we expect of ordinary life? What evidence could make us heed a warning so dire—and how would we go about responding to it? We are so inured to a long list of highly unlikely catastrophes that we are virtually programmed to dismiss them all with a wave of the hand: Sure, our civilization might devolve into chaos—and Earth might collide with an asteroid, too!...

Every April for the past decade, systems biologist Rodrigo Gutiérrez has driven 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) to reach one of the driest places on Earth: Chile’s Atacama Desert, parts of which receive less than three millimeters of rain annually. His team collected plants and soil from nearly two dozen sites each year, froze the samples in liquid nitrogen, and brought them back to his laboratory at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile....

Plants, and the insects which rely on them, are the living foundations of our planet. But these foundations are under stress because, as we urbanize and suburbanize natural areas, we have an unfortunate tendency to sterilize the landscape. Fields and forests are replaced with biological deserts made up of millions of acres of concrete, lawns and an array of ornamental trees and shrubs imported from around the world. Adding to the problem, our obsession with perfection leads us to spray pesticides liberally....

A huge new haul of planets has joined the tally of alien worlds discovered by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, scientists announced today. All of the new planets are members of multiplanet systems—stars with more than one orbiting satellite. Researchers used a new method for weeding out false signals from among the candidate planets found by Kepler, allowing them to add hundreds of “validated” planets to the count of Kepler’s finds. “We studied just over 1,200 systems, and from there we were able to validate 719 planets,” says Jason Rowe of NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif....

The brain of a common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) is no larger than a poppy seed, but the miniscule piece of tissue holds tens of thousands of neurons joined by tens of millions of synapses. Although it is no rival to the human brain, which contains more than 80 billion neurons, the fly organ is still an invaluable tool for investigating the neural circuity underlying some of the basic behaviors of more complex animals....

On May 8, 2021, as a deadly second wave of the COVID pandemic was ripping through India, an imprisoned doctoral student made an urgent appeal to the Delhi High Court. Incarcerated by the Indian government since May 2020 on dubious terror charges, Natasha Narwal asked for interim bail to see her father, agricultural scientist Mahavir Narwal, who was in an intensive care unit with the virus. The court procrastinated. She would never see her father again: he died the following evening, one among the 4,000 daily COVID fatalities India is currently reporting—undoubtedly an undercount....

The pieces are coming together for NASA’s newest spaceship Orion, with its first unmanned launch test scheduled for September 2014. The Orion space capsule is designed to carry humans farther into the solar system than they’ve ever been by taking trips to the moon, asteroids and Mars. It will be the first new spaceship built by NASA since the space shuttle was developed in the 1970s. The space agency is planning to outsource travel to low-Earth orbit, including the International Space Station, to the private space sector, allowing NASA itself to focus on traveling beyond....

After 49 years and $750 million, a Stanford ­University experiment using superconducting niobium spheres confirmed parts of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Do not try this at home. Intel announced the biggest breakthrough in computer chips in 50 years: “3-D transistors” that, like skyscrapers, pack more punch into less space. Armadillos, one of the only animals other than humans to carry leprosy, have been spreading the rare bacterial disease in the southern U....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It’s very hard to overstate how important the US power grid is to American society and its economy. Every critical infrastructure, from communications to water, is built on it and every important business function from banking to milking cows is completely dependent on it. And the dependence on the grid continues to grow as more machines, including equipment on the power grid, get connected to the Internet....

Although medicine has advanced far enough to treat basic headaches, strained muscles and the agony of having a cavity filled, inflammatory pain—the kind that results from osteoarthritis, bone cancer and back injuries—has proved to be a far more elusive target. Current remedies, including morphine and other opiates, flood all the nerves of the body, causing dangerous side effects. More localized remedies, such as steroid injections, wear off over time. Recently researchers have begun working with a toxin found in a Moroccan cactuslike plant that may be able to deliver permanent, local pain relief with a single injection....

Name the world’s most offensive odor: Rotting fish? Refinery fumes? Skunk spray? For many organic chemists, top honors go to a family of carbon-nitrogen-based compounds called isonitriles. This chemical group is “the Godzilla of smells … they make you vomit your guts out instantly,” declared Luca Turin, a leading olfaction theorist and protagonist of Chandler Burr’s 2003 biography, The Emperor of Scent. Add the fact that a prime ingredient for isonitriles is phosgene gas–a notorious chemical warfare agent from World War I, and it is little surprise that many investigators shun these noxious and unstable substances despite their acknowledged utility in drug discovery, polymer manufacture and elsewhere....

Key concepts Chemistry Water Light Fluorescence Energy Ultraviolet light Introduction Have you ever wondered how glow-in-the-dark things work? It can be a lot of fun to play with bracelets, wands and other toys that are glow-in-the-dark! Did you ever imagine that you could make something at home that glows? It turns out that it’s not that hard to do—all you need is tonic water and a black light! Some common household chemicals can also affect this beverage’s glow....

Maybe it’s your back, or your neck, or your knees. Perhaps it is a constant dull ache, a pulsating throb or a shooting flare. All of us feel pain from time to time, but an estimated 100 million American adults endure it day in and day out. Finding relief can be a headache in itself. In recent years well-meaning medical efforts to control pain have produced a secondary health crisis: widespread opioid addiction and a quadrupling of overdose deaths from prescription opioids since 1999....

Astronomers have discovered a unique set of triplets: an asteroid with two moons orbiting it. Described in a report published today in the journal Nature, the rare combination is the first of its kind ever observed. The asteroid is a 280-kilometer-wide body called 87 Sylvia, which was first sighted in 1866 and lies between Mars and Jupiter. Four years ago, scientists spotted a moon associated with the asteroid. Now Franck Marchis of the University of California at Berkeley and his colleagues have spied a second satellite circling 87 Sylvia using Yepun, one of the telescopes in the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope array....

Sometimes the best approach to problem solving is no strategy at all—an exploratory, “try anything” gambit. Such wild guessing can be a smart way to face a challenging competitor or explore unfamiliar terrain. Yet occasionally we get stuck in this random-guessing mode—we essentially keep pressing buttons with no thought to strategy. That is a phenomenon called learned helplessness, observable in people and animals who believe nothing they do can produce a desired outcome....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The production and trade of fish sauce in the ancient world was a significant and widespread industry, stretching from Britain to the Black Sea. Roman fish sauce, known as garum, was one of the most popular and commonly used ingredients in the Roman pantry. Some historians have even argued that fish sauce, common throughout Southeast Asia today, was introduced to the continental subregion via the Silk Road....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Although mentioned several times in the Biblical texts, the actual existence of the Hittites was largely forgotten until the late 19th century CE. With the discovery of Hattusa in 1834 CE, the city that was for many years the capital of the Hittite Empire, the Hittites were finally recognized as one of the great superpowers of the ancient Middle East in the Late Bronze Age (1550 - 1200 BCE)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Defining Thracian art is a difficult task due to the fact that what we call today Thrace was never a single unified state but, rather, a collection of many independent communities (or tribes) who formed both alliances and rivalries with each other over time. These tribes, although collectively called ‘Thracians’ by the Greeks and Romans, never thought of themselves as a unified community and differed from each other....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. “I come to ask, not the gods, but legislators…to erase from the code of the French the blood laws that command judicial murders” (Robespierre, 6). These impassioned words, spoken by Maximilien Robespierre before France’s National Constituent Assembly on 22 June 1791, urged the abolition of the death penalty, which Robespierre referred to as barbaric, pointless, and an antithesis to justice....