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Forget gargantuan whales and hefty cephalopods—the real marine mammoths may be the mighty microbes. They constitute at least half, and perhaps up to 90 percent, of the oceans’ total biomass, according to data gathered by the decade-long Census of Marine Life project. The estimate comes courtesy of high-throughput DNA sequencing, which suggests that there might be as many as 100 times more microbe genera than previously assumed. The increase in genus and species also raises the estimate of individual microbes....

The world is already on its way to a warmer future, and without radical change, experts said yesterday, that temperature rise soon will reach crisis levels. Scientists estimate that the planet has already warmed by about 0.8 degree Celsius since the 1850s, and new projections put temperature rise as high as 4 degrees by the middle of the 21st century if current emissions levels persist. Greenhouse gas reductions to date are failing to address climate change, said Naoko Ishii, CEO of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the financial mechanism of the U....

Today, the misery of war is all too striking in places such as Syria, Yemen, Tigray, Myanmar and Ukraine. It can come as a surprise to learn that there are scores of sustainably peaceful societies around the world, ranging from indigenous people in the Xingu River Basin in Brazil to countries in the European Union. Learning from these societies, and identifying key drivers of harmony, is a vital process that can help promote world peace....

French scientists have identified a protein receptor that resides in the taste buds and may be responsible for sensing fat. As such, this so-called fatty acid transporter, known as CD36, could be to blame for our love of high-fat foods–and could thus serve as a possible target for treatment of obesity. If the link bears out, CD36 would allow fat to join the five previously identified tastes that govern the experience of food: bitter, salty, sweet, sour and “umami,” or savoriness (like the meaty goodness of soup stock)....

Solutions: The best jump for the multi-minute button (MM) would be 8 minutes. In that case, the largest number of clicks would be 13. The worst case would be 54 minutes, which would require 6 clicks of the MM button followed by 7 clicks of the 1-minute button. The jump sizes for MM in this case would be a descending sequence: 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5 The largest number of clicks would then be 10....

The news that Chinese scientist He Jiankui had edited the genomes of twin baby girls who were born last fall was greeted with outrage and widespread condemnation by the scientific community. Now scientists are trying to put the cat back in the bag. The International Commission on the Clinical Use of Human Germline Genome Editing met in Washington, D.C., Tuesday in an effort to develop a framework for assessing the scientific, medical and ethical considerations for any experiments to edit the genomes of human cells that can be passed on to future generations—in other words, editing embryos and germ-line cells....

WHY IS THE STUDY of perception so appealing? One reason is that you can gain deep insights into the inner workings of your own brain by doing relatively simple experiments that any schoolchild could have done 100 years ago. More on those in a moment. Your sensory experience of the world does not involve faithfully transmitting the retinal image to a screen in the brain so that it can be “seen” by some inner eye....

As Arctic permafrost thaws, it unleashes a vicious cycle—the unfrozen soil releases its carbon reserves that intensify climate change, in turn accelerating the thaw. Now researchers have reported another disturbing discovery: The permafrost holds a much greater cache of mercury than thought—and as the ground warms, it could potentially release that toxic metal on the world. In the new study, published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, an international team of scientists drilled 13 permafrost soil cores at various locations in Alaska....

AS PART OF MY JOB reporting on neuroscience, I found myself in an unusual situation 10 years ago. During an interview, I offhandedly told a researcher to contact me if he ever needed a volunteer for a study. Months later the neurologist actually called, and I enrolled in a project on Parkinson’s disease. I was soon lying in a positron-emission tomography machine. Scientists injected a radioactive dye into my left arm, which felt warm and tingly as it coursed toward my brain....

The choice of drugs for “performance enhancement” that now confronts the athlete is a bewildering array of highly specialized products for various desired effects. In virtually every case, however, the doping athlete runs the risk of side effects that range from the merely inconvenient to the life-threatening. This table is only illustrative; no attempt has been made to compile complete lists. The drugs named in italics are specific examples in a category....

Americans burn through 140 billion gallons of gasoline a year. And even if drivers switch to more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, the nation’s fuel needs are expected to increase by a fifth over the next 20 years, thanks to dramatic increases in car and airplane use. Which is why, in addition to developing solar, wind and geothermal energy, policy makers, including President Barack Obama, are advocating biofuels to transform the transportation culture....

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, whom President-elect Donald Trump put forward Friday as his choice for attorney general, has questioned mainstream science on man-made climate change and attacked U.S. EPA for regulatory outreach. It’s a sign, activists say, that he would likely back Trump’s promises to roll back President Obama’s climate policies. The Department of Justice is not as high-profile on climate issues as EPA. But Sessions, if confirmed, could shape how the Trump administration defends and enforces environmental laws....

In novels and films, the most common scientist by far is the mad one. From H. G. Wells’s Dr. Mo­­reau to Ian Fleming’s Dr. No to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, scientists are portrayed as evil geniuses unrestrained by ethics and usually bent on world domination. Over the past two years, as I struggled to write my own novel about physicists and their quest for the Theory of Everything, I often worried that I was falling prey to this stereotype myself....

By Lisa Rapaport (Reuters Health) - Even though women now make up half of all U.S. medical school graduates, they remain much less likely than men to get research funding or become professors in medicine, two studies suggest. Nationwide, men outnumbered women on U.S. medical school faculties by two to one last year, and men edged out women by almost five to one in achieving senior posts as full professors, according to one of the studies published September 15 in JAMA....

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 Karbala (10 October 680 CE) was a small-scaled military engagement, fought near the river Euphrates, in modern-day Iraq, which saw the massacre of heavily outnumbered Alid troops under the command of Husayn ibn Ali (l. 626-680 CE and also given as Hussayn) by the army of the Umayyad Dynasty (661-750 CE)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The impact and consequences of the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) were many and far-reaching. Charles I of England (r. 1625-1649) was executed, and the monarchy was abolished. Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) then headed the Republic as the Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. For many commoners, their lands and property were confiscated, taxes were higher than ever, and they suffered death and disease like never before....

The Fish and Wildlife Service has rejected a bid to extend endangered species protection to a rabbit-like creature that environmentalists say could be pushed to extinction by rising temperatures. The warming of the American pika’s mountain habitat in California’s Sierra Nevada and in parts of nine other Western states has shrunk the tiny mammal’s population and could eliminate part of its range, but federal biologists say new studies suggest the pika will adjust to warmer homes or migrate to cooler areas upslope....

Georgios Dimitriadis thought he had botched the data. It was late on a Friday night and the University of California, Santa Cruz, astronomer was the last one in the office. He had been waiting anxiously for NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope to stream a batch of data toward Earth—not because he wanted to scour the observations for signs of exoplanets but because he was looking for a supernova. See, Kepler was designed to do one thing remarkably well: Monitor stars so closely that it could catch tiny flickers in brightness....

About 780 million people—a tenth of the world’s population—do not have access to clean drinking water. Water laced with contaminants such as bacteria, viruses, lead and arsenic claims millions of lives each year. But an inexpensive device that effectively clears such contaminants from water may help solve this problem. Thalappil Pradeep and his colleagues at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras developed a $16 nanoparticle water filtration system that promises potable water for even the poorest communities in India and, in the future, for those in other countries sharing the same plight....

One night in February, high school principal Matthew Smith got a frightening wake-up call. The local fire department alerted him that the home of a student at Agua Fria High School was contaminated with liquid mercury that apparently had been taken from a science classroom. The next day, emergency crews descended on the school in haz-mat suits, discovering a toxic trail of mercury vapors in classrooms, locker rooms, and buses. The high school, in Avondale, Ariz....