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Climate change is transforming the rivers of the Arctic region. The most dramatic shift is the rerouting of a major meltwater river in Canada that disappeared in what is, geologically speaking, the blink of an eye. The meltwater from the Slims River, which existed for at least 300 years, disappeared in just four days.* Scientists called it a case of “river piracy.” After glacial melt rerouted the river, it shifted from flowing northward into the Bering Sea to flowing southward into the Pacific Ocean....

The largest and most mysterious resident of the debris belt between Mars and Jupiter is an icy world called Ceres, and it’s on the threshold of being explored up close for the first time by NASA’s Dawn mission, which is scheduled to enter Ceres’s orbit on March 6. Discovered in 1801 by the Italian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, Ceres was initially thought to be a full-fledged planet. That began to change when one of Piazzi’s rivals, the astronomer William Herschel, noted that Ceres only appeared as a point of light in his telescope rather than a resolved disk, like the other known planets....

One of the least appreciated but most remarkable developments of the past 60 years is the extraordinary growth of American agriculture. Farming now accounts for about one tenth of the gross domestic product yet employs less than 1 percent of all workers. It has accomplished this feat through exceptionally high growth in productivity, which has kept prices of food low and thereby contributed to rising standards of living. Furthermore, the exportable surplus has kept the trade deficit from reaching unsupportable levels....

A barometer measures atmospheric pressure. Now a coalition of biologists is calling for a similar scientific tool to measure extinction pressure on Earth’s biodiversity—a so-called “barometer of life”. After all, scientists have conclusively identified only a fraction of the species that exist on Earth; the roughly 1.9 million species catalogued to date may represent only 20 percent of the total biodiversity on the planet. “Species disappear before we know they existed,” wrote biologists Simon Stuart, chair of the Species Survival Commission at the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Edward O....

New research shows that cells often randomly deactivate one of a pair of gene copies or alleles, one of which they get from mom, the other from dad. This inactivation may potentially help explain why some children in a family may exhibit certain heritable disorders, whereas others do not. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston found that such disruptions may take place in as many as 1,000 genes in the autosomal genome (the part of our genetic repertoire that excludes sex cells), leading to different outcomes in the structures and levels of the proteins coded by these genes....

Not nearly enough money is flowing into low-carbon investments to meet the goals of the Paris climate accord, according to a U.N. report released yesterday. Since 2014, when the U.N. Environment Programme created the U.N. Environment Inquiry to study ways to make the global financial system less reliant on fossil fuels, central banks, regulators and the private sector have noted more and more that climate change poses an economic threat to the world....

Twenty years ago I wrote a profile of primatologist and author Frans de Waal for another magazine. As a placeholder for the title until we could think of a better one, I came up with “The Writing on de Waal.” I’m both delighted and appalled to say that either by an act of editorial commission or by one of omission, the piece was published with that title. Now I have the chance to write on de Waal again, in the context of the arrival of his latest book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?...

Cocaine–a stimulating alkaloid crushed out of the leaves of the coca plant–has been reported to increase euphoria and energy as well as to trigger a mind-killing addiction in humans. The appeal is not limited to our species; rats and other animals given access to the drug will pursue it with a vigor normally reserved for procreation. This vigorous drive for the drug derives from its ability to stimulate the brain’s reward pathways, altering the chemical dance of neurotransmitters that tells us what is good to do–again and again and again....

Under House Democrats’ draft climate and energy bill, U.S. EPA would be tasked with launching a raft of major climate programs, dramatically boosting the workload of a cash-strapped agency already struggling to meet a long list of regulatory deadlines. The draft directs EPA to implement several new programs aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions and boosting transportation efficiency – this for an agency trying to revisit Bush-era regulations returned for review by federal courts and set new protection policies for air and water pollution....

A new study attacks the technique of using fractals, the repeating patterns found in everything from coastlines to fern fronds, to help distinguish authentic Jackson Pollock drip paintings from paint splattered by lesser hands. In a paper submitted for publication to a major physics journal, researchers report that previously published criteria for identifying genuine Pollocks based on the presence of fractals—patterns that recur in varying sizes like Russian dolls nested inside one another—would wrongly grant Pollock status to a pair of amateur drip paintings....

Misshapen proteins called prions lie at the root of mad cow disease and similar brain ailments, but the role of these molecules in their normal form remains unclear. In humans, normal prion proteins may generally protect against Alzheimer’s disease. In Alzheimer’s, abnormally folded beta-amyloid protein accumulates in the brain. Biochemist Nigel Hooper of the University of Leeds in England and his colleagues found that high levels of normal prion proteins in human cells prevent beta-amyloid formation by inhibiting an enzyme called beta-secretase....

It just may be a hunger for wood pellets that drives a resurgence of freight rail in the U.S. Southeast. European demand for this greener fuel is expected to triple by 2020, driven by climate-friendly policies that encourage coal-fired utilities to burn biomass as well to cut down on carbon dioxide emissions. But Europe does not have enough wood pellets, and the shortfall between global supply and demand is expected to grow to 45 million metric tons per year....

As California’s Camp Fire raged in 2018, soot and other pollution filled the skies. Particulate matter concentrations widely surged above 12 micrograms per cubic meter (µg/m3), pushing them into the Environmental Protection Agency’s “unhealthy” range. And in some places, they jumped to hundreds of µg/m3. This miasma included particles 2.5 microns in diameter or smaller, known as PM2.5, which also spew from tailpipes and smokestacks as cars burn gas and power plants combust coal....

It’s an oft-repeated idea that blind people can compensate for their lack of sight with enhanced hearing or other abilities. The musical talents of Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, both blinded at an early age, are cited as examples of blindness conferring an advantage in other areas. Then there’s the superhero Daredevil, who is blind but uses his heightened remaining senses to fight crime. It is commonly assumed that the improvement in the remaining senses is a result of learned behavior; in the absence of vision, blind people pay attention to auditory cues and learn how to use them more efficiently....

Many studies have examined the effects of sufficient versus insufficient sleep on mental health. A new study, published in February in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence, takes a more nuanced look, attempting to determine just how much each hour less per night really costs—where teenagers are concerned. The researchers surveyed an ethnically diverse sample of 27,939 suburban high school students in Virginia. Although teenagers need about nine hours of sleep a night on average, according to the National Institutes of Health, only 3 percent of students reported getting that amount, and 20 percent of participants indicated that they got five hours or less....

This past September 23 a Canadian 9/11 “truther” confronted me after a talk I gave at the University of Lethbridge. He turned out to be a professor there who had one of his students filming the “confrontation.” By early the next morning the video was online, complete with music, graphics, cutaways and edits apparently intended to make me appear deceptive (search YouTube for “Michael Shermer, Anthony J. Hall”). “You, sir, are not skeptical on that subject—you are gullible,” Hall raged....

Herbert’s FLASH system—the acronym stood for “first laser-amplified superluminal hookup”—employed a source that emitted pairs of photons in opposite directions. The scheme focused on photons’ polarization—that is, the directions along which their associated electric fields oscillated. The photons could be plane-polarized, with the electric fields oscillating either horizontally (H) or vertically (V). Or the photons could be circularly polarized, with the electric fields tracing out helical patterns in either a right-handed (R) or left-handed (L) orientation....

Few wildlife spectacles in North America compare to the sight of bears gathered along streams and rivers to scoop up spawning salmon. The hungry bears have long attracted attention, particularly from fishery managers, who in the late 1940s proposed their broadscale culling in Alaska to reduce the “economic damage” the predators might be wreaking on salmon populations. In fact, several sensationalized reports implied that Alaska might fall into “financial and social collapse” unless the bear populations were controlled....

Could our universe have come into being as a three-dimensional shell around a four-dimensional black hole? In the current issue’s cover story, “The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time,” authors Niayesh Afshordi, Robert B. Mann and Razieh Pourhasan suggest a revision to the idea that the universe originated from an infinitely dense point. It sounds fantastic, but the result is the outcome of calculations that use the mathematics of space and time....

The first U.S. industry to face a cap on its greenhouse gas emissions is not, as may be expected, the coal-burning power utilities. It’s not the oil refineries, churning through crude. It’s not the automakers, manufacturing again. It’s the airline industry. Sometime this month, the European Union will release a list of airlines it will regulate under its existing cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide. Beginning in 2012, all international flights landing in the region must abide by the regulations....