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The F-150 notwithstanding, Americans are choosing more efficient cars. George Will has been described as an “intellectual,” as “erudite,” “brilliant,”even “brainy.” If you’ve ever heard him on television, you’d have to admit that his opinion of his own intellect seems to be quite high. And yet for such an erudite and brainy fellow, it’s amazing how often he gets it wrong when it comes to things environmental. (No comment on his other positions....

By Susanna Twidale LONDON (Reuters) - The developers of a project to expand the world’s largest offshore wind farm, Britain’s London Array, said a requirement for a study of its impact on birds was forcing them to scrap the plan. It would take at least three years to complete a necessary assessment of the potential impact to birdlife from the expansion, the consortium of Dong Energy, E.ON and Abu Dhabi state-owned energy investor Masdar said on Wednesday....

Jean Reimers, a 75-year-old retired supermarket cashier, enjoys her life in Grand Island, Neb., a small city near the Platte River that boasts attractions such as the Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer and a sandhill crane nature reserve. Nearly two years ago Reimers found out from her local doctor that she had cancer. The worse news was that it was late-stage metastatic lung cancer, hard to treat and with a dismally low survival rate....

By Nicola Nosengo It may have begun as the hobby of a Swiss lab technician but, ten years on, the e-CALLISTO network of spectrometers now encircles the globe, recording solar radio emissions around the clock. The nineteenth instrument in the ground-based, low-cost system was set up in Anchorage, Alaska, last week–completing a chain of stations around the globe.The CALLISTO (Compound Astronomical Low-cost Low-frequency Instrument for Spectroscopy in Transportable Observatory) spectrometers, designed and built by electronics engineer Christian Monstein of the Institute for Astronomy of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), record the intensity of electromagnetic radiation at radio frequencies, between 45 and 870 megahertz....

You have probably heard of green buildings, green cars and, perhaps, even green phones. But were you aware that green beer is flowing from the taps of some U.S. breweries, and not the kind for St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow? Among the leaders of the movement is Lucky Labrador Brewing Company in Portland, Ore., which for the past year has been saving big bucks by using solar energy to heat water used in the brewing process....

“Everybody knows” that the pace of daily life is speeding up, accelerated by the proliferation of mobile phones, tablets, WiFi and other communication technologies and by fallout from the 2007 economic crisis. As if anyone needed reminding of this trend, book titles echoing the faster-paced theme include The Overworked American and Busy Bodies in the early 1990s through to Faster, Fighting for Time, and Busier Than Ever. However, despite this broad consensus, and its obvious health and quality-of-life implications, there seems little empirical survey evidence that daily life is truly speeding up....

The brain’s ability to learn and form memories of day-to-day facts and events depends on the hippocampus, a structure deep within the brain. But is the hippocampus still maintaining the memory of, say, the commencement address at your college graduation 20 years ago? The latest evidence suggests that as memories age, the hippocampus’s participation wanes. In a 2006 study, neuroscientist Larry R. Squire of the University of California, San Diego, and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System studied patients who had hippocampal damage....

When two of us (Langer and Vacanti) last wrote in this magazine 10 years ago about prospects for tissue engineering, the very idea that living flesh could be “constructed” by following engineering principles and combining nonliving materials with cells sounded fantastical to many. Yet the need for such transplantable human tissues to replace, restore or enhance organ function was, and remains, urgent. Today nearly 50 million people in the U.S. are alive because of various forms of artificial organ therapy, and one in every five people older than 65 in developed nations is very likely to benefit from organ replacement technology during the remainder of their lives....

Klaus Jacob had been warning New York City for a decade that a hurricane like Sandy barreling in from the east could flood downtown Manhattan and coastal New Jersey. Most recently, he and other scientists published a big 2011 report detailing the threat and recommending ways of protecting the region against storm surges. Jacob felt Sandy’s wrath firsthand, too—his house in Piermont, N.Y., on the enormous Hudson River about 25 kilometers north of Manhattan, was flooded with 60 centimeters (two feet) of water....

Deadly Ebola probably touched down in Lagos, Nigeria, the largest city in Africa, on July 20. A man who was thought to be infected with the virus had arrived there on a flight from Liberia, where, along with Guinea and Sierra Leone, the largest recorded Ebola outbreak is currently raging. The Lagos case is the first to be internationally exported by air travel and today the UK foreign secretary announced that he would chair a government meeting on Ebola....

When hundreds of physicists gathered on a Zoom call in late February to discuss their experiment’s results, none of them knew what they had found. Like doctors in a clinical trial, the researchers at the Muon g-2 experiment blinded their data, concealing a single variable that prevented them from being biased about or knowing—for years—what the information they were working with actually meant. But when the data were unveiled over Zoom, the physicists knew the wait had been worth it: their results are further evidence that new physics is hiding in muons, the bulkier cousins of electrons....

Natural marijuanalike chemicals may direct key brain cells to make proper connections while in the womb, according to a new study. Researchers report that the molecules, called cannabinoids, serve as guideposts for young cells in the attention and decision-making parts of fetal mouse brains. The finding may help explain studies showing that the children of mothers who smoked marijuana during pregnancy are slower to process information than their peers (although they are just as intelligent overall)....

The ancient roots of Chinese medicine briefly took center stage when half a share in the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was given to Youyou Tu, who consulted traditional texts on herbs to help isolate and purify the malaria drug artemisinin. The medication saves some 100,000 lives each year in Africa as well as restoring the health of countless others around the world. The other half of the Nobel prize was awarded to William C....

The success of SpaceX’s first-ever crewed mission has NASA very optimistic about the future of human spaceflight. A SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico today (Aug. 2), wrapping up the company’s historic Demo-2 test flight to the International Space Station. Demo-2’s May 30 launch was the first orbital crewed mission to depart from U.S. soil since the final flight of NASA’s space shuttle program, back in 2011....

Ann was 15 weeks pregnant with her fourth child when the results of her prenatal genetic test came back last August. The test suggested that her daughter, whom she and her husband planned to name Juliet, was missing one of her two X chromosomes — a condition called Turner syndrome that can cause dwarfism, heart defects, and infertility, among other complications. Many people decide to terminate their pregnancies after this diagnosis, a genetic counselor told Ann and her husband....

Like many cities of the North American Sunbelt, Las Gridas is a big grid of two-way roads (three lanes for each direction), some going east-west and some north-south. Most people get around by driving their cars. But gridlock and energy costs have finally driven the normally car-loving culture to reconsider its disdain for buses. To go from corner (x,y) to (x’,y’) one could imagine taking a bus first to (x’,y) and then to (x’,y’)....

Ionic liquids – salts that are liquid at room temperature – could potentially be made more cheaply and greenly by recycling by-products from biofuel production processes, according to US researchers. These ionic liquids derived from biofuel waste could then actually be turned to extracting sugars from biomass to be made into fuels. One of the biggest challenges in breaking down biomass into useful chemicals suitable for making biofuels is finding ways to selectively depolymerise lignocellulosic biomass into its monomers: glucose, xylose and lignin....

On June 12, avid roboticists will bring several hundred robots from around the world to Fort Mason, Calif., to compete in RoboGames 2009. Some machines at the weekend event will come designed to turn other bots into scrap metal or to knock contenders out of a ring sumo-style, whereas others, seeking more peaceful competitive outlets, will try to prevail in soccer matches or impress artistically. Originally called ROBOlympics (until 2005, when the International Olympic Committee nixed the name), the games, entering their sixth year, are organized in much the same way as that celebrated world athletic exhibition: Teams from various countries (19 last year) compete in between 50 and 60 events for gold, silver and bronze medals....

You can build a coal-fired power plant just about anywhere. Renewables, on the other hand, are finicky. The strongest winds blow across the high plains. The sun shines brightest on the desert. Transporting that energy into cities hundreds of kilometers away will be one of the great challenges of the switch to renewable energy. The most advanced superconducting cable can move those megawatts thousands of kilometers with losses of only a few percent....

Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness by Alva Noë. Hill and Wang, 2009 Alva No, a University of California, Berkeley, philosopher and cognitive scientist, argues that after decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers “only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious … has emerged unchallenged: we don’t have a clue.” The reason we have been unable to explain the neural basis of consciousness, he says, is that it does not take place in the brain....