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MARIETTA, Ga.—It’s Monday night at the Battle & Brew, a gamer hangout in this Atlanta suburb. The crowd is slumping in chairs, ears entombed in headphones, eyes locked on flat-screen monitors and minds lost in tonight’s game of choice: “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.” To help stay alert all night, each man has an open can of “gamer fuel” inches from his keyboard. “I’ve seen some of these dudes plow through six sodas in six hours,” said Brian Smawley, a regular at the gamer bar....

Mammals new to science have been emerging in Southeast Asia of late: three new species of deer found in the forests of Vietnam in the 1990s; a long-whiskered rat representing a previously unknown family of mammals discovered at a hunter’s market in Laos and revealed in May; and now a cat-size creature with orange fur and a long, strong tail has been photographed in Indonesia. A camera trap set in the mountains of Kayan Mentarang National Park in Borneo snapped two images of the mysterious creature as it trundled through the rain forest in 2003....

BEIJING—Winds rush through the capital city of China, blowing dust storms that envelop it in grit from the encroaching Gobi Desert each spring. Last year, the government finally took advantage of those winds, installing 33 wind turbines manufactured by domestic company Xinjiang Gold Wind at the Guanting wind power field to harvest this energy and use it to supplement the electricity provided by polluting coal. Those suburban turbines began turning in earnest on January 20, providing 35 million kilowatt-hours of electricity to Beijing through July, or roughly 300,000 kilowatt-hours a day....

Chinese skylines are defined by construction cranes and the din of jackhammers. China produces 50 percent of the world’s cement [pdf]—the next largest producer, India is responsible for just 6 percent—to build seemingly endless tracts of high rises, railroads, parking lots, highways, airports and shopping malls. But all booms end—and China’s may end sooner than most people think. A study released on April 27 by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s (LBNL) China Energy Group says that this high-growth phase of China’s development could wind down in less than two decades....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. By Michael Parker, Environment and Energy Editor, The Conversation The term “carbon capture and storage” seems only to appear when shortly followed by “not commercially proven” or “in development”. But construction has now begun on what will be the world’s first commercial carbon dioxide mineralization plant, in which carbon dioxide greenhouse gas is transformed into baking soda....

By Jo Marchant A Viking legend tells of a glowing “sunstone” that, when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the sun even on a cloudy day. It sounds like magic, but scientists measuring the properties of light in the sky say that polarizing crystals–which function in the same way as the mythical sunstone–could have helped ancient sailors to cross the northern Atlantic. A review of their evidence was published January 31 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B....

A small dog should be belly-up after eating a handful of holiday chocolates, at least according to pet owners’ conventional wisdom. But watching Moose, a friend’s five-pound Chihuahua, race around the living room after his sweet snack made me wonder: Is chocolate truly poisonous to dogs? It is. The cacao bean, the central ingredient in chocolate, can sicken or, in some cases, kill members of the Canidae family. The Chemical Culprit...

The 38 countries that pledged to restrain their emissions of climate change–inducing greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide (CO2), are failing, according to new figures released today. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the body charged with overseeing global emission reduction efforts, says that, overall, greenhouse emissions—measured in terms of the most ubiquitous: carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e)—dropped by 894 million metric tons between 1990 and 2006 (the latest year for which figures are available)....

For a limited time, the full text of this article is being made available for fans of Scientific American’s page on Facebook. Read it now or become a fan. One hundred years ago, in June 1911, Robert Falcon Scott and 32 explorers—most of them British scientists, naval officers or seafarers—were huddled in the darkness of the Antarctic winter, when the sun never rises above the horizon and up to eight feet of ice seals the surrounding sea....

With concerns about the warming Arctic already at an all-time high, scientists are beginning to investigate a potential side effect of melting glaciers. Research suggests the thawing ice could be a source of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Two separate studies published in November identified sites in Greenland and Iceland that seemed to be emitting methane into the air (Climatewire, Nov. 26, 2018). Now a third study, published yesterday in Nature, adds another site to the list....

The President pulled himself up the long ramp to the platform of his railway car…. Friend or foe, those who saw him at this moment could not help being moved at the sight of this severely crippled man making his way up with such great difficulty—really propelling himself along by his arm and shoulder muscles as his strong hands grasped the rails at the side of the ramp. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s whistle-stop train tours in the presidential campaigns of 1932 and 1936, as described here by his speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, have become the stuff of legend....

ZURICH, Switzerland – Despite a strong philosophical connection, computers and brains inhabit separate realms in research. IBM, though, believes the time is ripe to bring them together. Through research projects expected to take a decade, Big Blue is using biological and manufactured forms of computing to learn about the other. On the computing side, IBM is using the brain as a template for breakthrough designs such as the idea of using fluids both to cool the machine and to distribute electrical power....

Dear EarthTalk: I understand that the use of antibiotics in raising farm animals is threatening to make bacteria overall more resistant to antibiotics, which has serious life and death implications for people. Can you enlighten and advise what is being done about this?—Robert Gelb, Raleigh, N.C. Most medical doctors would agree that antibiotic drugs—which stave off bacterial infections from staph to salmonella to bacterial pneumonia—are among the most important tools in modern medicine....

Mountain View, California On dozens of nights each year, NASA sends a jumbo jet carrying a 2.5-metre telescope into the sky. As it flies above much of the Earth’s atmosphere, this one-of-a-kind observatory—a US–German partnership known as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA)—peers into the hearts of newborn stars and other astronomical wonders. It recently spotted, among other discoveries, the first type of molecule known to have formed in the Universe....

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. Need to trade your favorite stock while sitting at home in your pajamas? No problem. High speed, point-to-point communications is something brokerage firms have long taken advantage of. Trading stock a split second faster than your competitor can translate into huge profits. But need to send images from a CT scan to Dallas from Detroit? The process will be less efficient and may well result in a repeat scan....

Soaring temperatures, intensified flood risks and heightened water stress will threaten 57 U.S. nuclear plants over the next 20 years, forcing operators to take additional resiliency measures, according to a new report. “The consequences of climate change can affect every aspect of nuclear plant operations—from fuel handling and power and steam generation to maintenance, safety systems and waste processing,” said the analysis, which was published yesterday by Moody’s Investors Service. Analysts used data from Four Twenty Seven, a Moody’s affiliate that provides climate risk intelligence, to examine threats to operating nuclear plants....

What’s as long as a pickup truck, as heavy as a white rhinoceros and as weird-looking as Zuul, the monster from the 1984 “Ghostbusters” movie? A newfound species of ankylosaurus. In a new study, researchers describe the 75-million-year-old dinosaur that lived during the Cretaceous and sported bony armor and spikes. Due to its uncanny resemblance to Zuul, paleontologists are calling it Zuul crurivastator (CRUR-uh-vass-TATE-or). The genus name is a nod to Zuul, the fictional Gatekeeper of Gozer in “Ghostbusters....

Encoding information in quantum particles such as photons, the quanta of light, could lead to powerful new technologies, such as ultrafast quantum computers and unbreakable quantum cryptography. A method for loading the information carried by two photons into a single photon, described in Nature Photonics, suggest a way to boost the efficiency of data transmission in such systems. Data streams in conventional fiber-optic networks are routinely combined, or ‘multiplexed’, to increase network capacity....

For more than 20 years photojournalist Joel Sartore has been making studio portraits of species from around the world. This book brings together 69 captivating images of organisms on the brink, from the leatherback sea turtle to the carnivorous pitcher plant. Journalist Molly Caldwell Crosby chronicles the chilling history of encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, that swept across the globe in the shadow of the Spanish Flu, claiming millions of lives before it ended abruptly in 1927....

Conventional traffic engineering assumes that given no increase in vehicles, more roads mean less congestion. So when planners in Seoul tore down a six-lane highway a few years ago and replaced it with a five-mile-long park, many transportation professionals were surprised to learn that the city’s traffic flow had actually improved, instead of worsening. “People were freaking out,” recalls Anna Nagurney, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who studies computer and transportation networks....