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Santos’s relatives were among more than 1,500 people across 50 countries to be murdered in retaliation for protecting land, water, forests and other natural resources between 2002 and 2017. The annual death toll doubled over that 15-year period, and the killings tended to take place in countries with high levels of corruption and weak rule of law, according to study findings published Monday in Nature Sustainability. As the authors report, in that period, murders of environmental defenders outweighed the combined deaths of soldiers from the U....

The recent release of an independent geochemical consulting firm’s report concluding that carbon dioxide is leaking from one of the world’s largest CO2 geologic storage projects—located at the Weyburn–Midale oil fields in Saskatchewan—has caused a public relations crisis, not only for Cenovus Energy, the oil company that operates the site, but for the CO2-alleviation strategy of carbon capture and storage (CCS). But scientists are pushing back, arguing that the evidence does not justify the report’s conclusions....

The treatment of hepatitis C virus infections has taken a major step forward with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of two new drugs, telaprevir and boceprevir, for managing the disease. Blocking the same viral protein as the first ­anti-HIV drugs, they are also the latest chapter in an ongoing story of medical success. Telaprevir and boceprevir are protease inhibitors, thwarting the activity of key viral enzymes. The first in this class of drugs was saquinavir, available since 1995 for the treatment of HIV....

The drama over Pluto’s planethood is certainly something that pits researchers against one another, but it obscures an actual scientific mystery: how some of those undeniably planetlike planets formed. Researchers agree that the terrestrial planets–Mercury through Mars–are the product of increasingly large chunks of rock smashing together over millions of years. How gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn arose in our solar system and around other stars is a more nebulous question....

By Edwin CartlidgeOur view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles – and even triangles – but that doesn’t mean we’re seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background–the radiation left over from the Big Bang–might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic ‘aeon’ that existed before our Universe....

Three quarks for muster mark! Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake As he later explained in his 1995 book The Quark and the Jaguar, physicist Murray Gell-Mann had the sound of his theorized particle in mind before discovering the spelling he would eventually adopt from a book James Joyce published in 1939. “The number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature,” Gell-Mann wrote, referring to how three quarks make up a proton, itself a component, along with the electron and neutron, of atoms....

Originally posted on the Nature news blog Yitang Zhang, a mathematician who recently emerged from obscurity when he partly solved a long-standing puzzle in number theory, is one of the 2014 fellows of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The awards, commonly known as ‘genius grants’, were announced on September 17. Each comes with a no-strings-attached $625,000 stipend paid out over five years. Zhang, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, was honored for his work on prime numbers, whole numbers that are divisible only by 1 or themselves....

Secrets of the Universe: How We Discovered the Cosmos by Paul Murdin. University of Chicago Press, 2009 Astronomer Paul Murdin traces the history of astronomical discoveries—from the shape of Earth to the cosmic microwave background to the origin of the elements. Pictured at the right is the N49 supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Supernovae play a key role in distributing the elements made in stars. The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference by Alan Boyle....

The all-powerful potential of stem cells to become any kind of cell is what makes them so promising for restoring diseased or damaged tissues throughout the body—and also what makes them so difficult for scientists to control. But several breakthroughs represent major strides toward understanding and harnessing the cells’ elusive property of inherent “stemness.” Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, who transformed a regular mouse skin cell into a cell with most of the characteristics of embryonic stem cells (ESCs) by turning up the activity of just four genes, demonstrated recently a more precise way of isolating cells “reprogrammed” to an ESC-like state—and several other laboratories have replicated his results....

The Department of Energy and the nation’s utilities are exploring ways to make cities more resilient in the face of mounting and costly blackouts from severe storms and heat waves that are increasing with climate change. They will use of a variety of relatively new features appearing in urban grids, including large storage batteries, a rising number of rooftop solar installations, and new computer-controlled programs and switches. They will also ask for help from homeowners....

By Dan Whitcomb (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Ana, churning in the Pacific Ocean, was forecast to become a hurricane bearing 90-mile-per-hour (145-kph) winds as early as Tuesday night, forecasters said, and was on a track that could see it bearing down on Hawaii later this week. If so, Ana would be the first hurricane to hit Hawaii since Iniki in 1992, although National Weather Service forecasters said it was still too early to predict that it would make landfall on the archipelago....

In his 1974 commencement speech at the California Institute of Technology, Nobel laureate physicist Richard P. Feynman articulated the foundation of scientific integrity: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool…. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.” Unfortunately, says Feynman’s Caltech colleague David Goodstein in his new book On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science (Princeton University Press, 2010), some scientists do try to fool their colleagues, and believing that everyone is conventionally honest may make a person more likely to be duped by deliberate fraud....

When researchers at Boston University (BU) in Massachusetts inserted a gene from the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 into a strain of the virus from the beginning of the pandemic, they were trying to understand why Omicron causes mild disease. But the experiments, described in a 14 October preprint, have ignited a red-hot controversy over what constitutes truly risky SARS-CoV-2 research—especially now that much of the world’s population has some immune protection from the virus and COVID-19 treatments are available....

If you care about reducing your emissions of greenhouse gases, then you might want to move to Honolulu, Los Angeles or Portland, Ore., according to a new study from The Brookings Institution. These three metropolises boast, respectively, the lowest three per capita levels of world warming pollution (read: carbon dioxide) in the nation’s top 100 metro areas. “Large metropolitan areas give their inhabitants smaller carbon footprints,” says energy policy expert Marilyn Brown of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (ranked 67th), lead author of the study....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Ancient East Asia was dominated by the three states known today as China, Japan, and Korea. These kingdoms traded raw materials and high-quality manufactured goods, exchanged cultural ideas and practices, and fought each other in equal measure throughout the centuries. The complex chain of successive kingdoms in all three states has created a rich web of events that historians have sometimes found difficult to disentangle; a situation not helped by modern nationalist claims and ideals superimposed on antiquity from all three parties....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Bronze Age in Sicily, considered one of the most important periods of the island’s prehistory, witnessed the establishment of a unitary and in some ways artistically vibrant culture. The three main phases of the period take their name from the most important centres at the time in question: Castelluccio (Early Bronze Age), Thapsos (Middle Bronze Age) and Pantalica (Late Bronze Age)....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. For centuries, the Parthenon has been Athens’ biggest tourist magnet. Pausanias gushed over it in the 2nd century CE, Elgin coveted it, Byron mourned for it, and countless tour groups and camera-toting enthusiasts swarm over it today. But stunning as it undoubtedly is, there are other sites dotted around the city which almost no one takes the time to visit....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. Time has seen the rise and fall of a number of great empires - the Babylonian, the Assyrian, the Egyptian, and lastly, the Persian. Regardless of the size or skill of their army or the capabilities of their leaders, all of these empires fell into ruin. History has demonstrated that one of the many reasons for this ultimate decline was the empire’s vast size - they simply grew too large to manage, falling susceptible to external, as well as internal, forces....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Ancient Greek symposium is often considered an important part of Greek culture, a place where the elite drank, feasted and indulged in sometimes decadent activities. Although such practices were present in symposia, the writing and performance of poetry is perhaps the most interesting and thought-provoking element of the ancient sympotic tradition....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. One of the most celebrated works of Hellenistic art is without doubt the Nike of Samothrace, on display at the Louvre since 1884 CE. The white Parian marble statue represents the personification of winged victory. In a sense, the impact of the 2.75 m high statue is even greater now because the head and both arms of the goddess are missing....