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My views on climate change—and, more generally, on humanity’s future—have never been stable. Depending on what I’m reading, and perhaps shifts in my neural weather, I ricochet between optimism and dread. Last spring I was feeling pretty glum about, well, everything when iconoclastic environmental activist Michael Shellenberger sent me a prepublication copy of his book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. Before I weigh in on the book, some background....

Expanding waistlines are not just tipping scales but may also push the mercury higher around the world, according to a new study. As humanity becomes more rotund, more resources are needed to cool, nourish and transport the extra weight, a trend that can contribute to climate change by requiring the consumption of more fossil fuels and resulting in more greenhouse gas emissions. Emerging economies are nudging their way into this movement as they seek the trappings of modern prosperity – personal cars, sedentary air-conditioned office jobs and fast-food – through dirty energy....

Karen Harpp, an assistant professor of geology at Colgate University, provides this explanation: Image: PHOTODISCVOLCANIC ERUPTIONS inject ash and aerosol clouds into the atmosphere and produce more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide each year. In 1784, Benjamin Franklin made what may have been the first connection between volcanoes and global climate while stationed in Paris as the first diplomatic representative of the United States of America. He observed that during the summer of 1783, the climate was abnormally cold, both in Europe and back in the U....

Your chances of surviving an airplane crash, like the recent crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 at San Francisco International Airport, are surprisingly good. More than 95 percent of the airplane passengers involved in a crash survive, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Despite this reassuring statistic, many people adopt a fatalistic attitude toward plane crashes — which can result in a dangerous level of apathy, especially regarding preflight safety briefings....

Before the coronavirus pandemic, there was a loneliness epidemic. By some estimates, two thirds of Americans often or always felt lonely in 2019. So when quarantines and shelter-in-place orders began, I was one of many social scientists who raised concerns that loneliness might worsen in the months to come. Would prolonged isolation trigger a “social recession,” as former U.S. surgeon general Vivek H. Murthy and physician Alice T. Chen put it?...

Listen very carefully in the rainforests of Brazil and you might hear a series of quiet, high-pitched squeaks. These are the alarm calls of the black-fronted titi (Callicebus nigrifrons), a monkey with a rusty-brown tail that lives in small family units. The cries are loaded with information.Cristiane Cäsar, a biologist at the University of St Andrews, UK, and her colleagues report that the titis mix and match two distinct calls to tell each other about the type of predator that endangers them, as well as the location of the threat....

By Richard A. Lovett of Nature magazineNext week, Neptune will complete its first full orbit of the Sun since it was discovered in 1846.The blue planet, the farthest out in the Solar System, remains one of Earth’s most mysterious neighbors, but scientists now know one thing that they hadn’t for the past 165 years: the precise length of its day.Earlier estimates had set that figure at about 16 hours and 6 minutes....

As humankind’s first robotic visitor to Pluto approaches its destination, astronomers working to understand what it will find there have uncovered a tiny moon orbiting the dwarf planet. The moon is the fifth known natural satellite of Pluto and has been informally labeled P5. It was discovered Saturday, July 7, in images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a campaign to identify possible hazards to the New Horizons spacecraft, now en route to Pluto for a 2015 flyby....

When Janet Riordan returned home from a European vacation in January, she expected a storm of tail wagging and barking from her 7-year-old golden retriever, Reggie. The moment she saw him, she knew something was wrong. “He came to me in my arms and appeared to be sobbing. I had never seen an animal behave like that,” said Riordan, who lives in Mequon, a suburb of Milwaukee, Wis. A veterinarian confirmed her fears: Reggie had an aggressive form of lymphoma, a cancer of the white blood cells....

You have probably seen the television commercial in which a cell phone technician travels to remote places and asks on his phone, “Can you hear me now?” Imagine this technician traveling to the center of our Milky Way galaxy, wherein lurks a massive black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), weighing as much as 4.5 million suns. As the technician approached within 10 million kilometers of the black hole, we would hear his cadence slow down and his voice deepen and fade, eventually turning to a monotone whisper with diminishing reception....

The cassava mealybug (Phenacoccus manihoti) thrives on the plant’s starchy root—a staple of many diets worldwide. That’s because the pest and the crop evolved together in South America, before Europeans transplanted the woody shrub across the world in Africa and Asia. In the absence of these pest insects the crop has thrived in countries ranging from Nigeria to Thailand. Unfortunately, the mealybug is equally capable of traveling via a human vector—and it is now devastating the cassava (aka manioc or yucca) crop on some 200,000 hectares in Thailand, where some 60 percent of global exports (worth $1....

When it really comes down to it—when the chips are down and the lights are off—are we naturally good? That is, are we predisposed to act cooperatively, to help others even when it costs us? Or are we, in our hearts, selfish creatures? This fundamental question about human nature has long provided fodder for discussion. Augustine’s doctrine of original sin proclaimed that all people were born broken and selfish, saved only through the power of divine intervention....

There is a gaping hole in the latest effort to reinvigorate the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), one so big it could hold an estimated 357 million boxes of cornflakes. The hole opened last week when tech billionaire Yuri Milner announced the Breakthrough Listen initiative, a 10-year, $100-million shot in the arm for SETI, operated through Milner’s Breakthrough Prize Foundation. The initiative includes funding for unprecedented amounts of SETI time at three world-class observatories: the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Automated Planet Finder telescope in California and the Parkes Observatory in Australia....

As fans of “Duck Dynasty” can attest, hunting for nutria – big, water-loving rodents with bright orange front teeth – is hugely popular in Louisiana. This might not be exclusive to the bayou for long. As winters warm, nutria could migrate across the country, according to new research. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey found that during a recent string of mild winters, nutria populations expanded northward in the United States....

Recognizing when a friend or colleague feels sad, angry or surprised is key to getting along with others. But a new study suggests that a knack for eavesdropping on feelings may sometimes come with an extra dose of stress. This and other research challenge the prevailing view that emotional intelligence is uniformly beneficial to its bearer. In a study published in the September 2016 issue of Emotion, psychologists Myriam Bechtoldt and Vanessa Schneider of the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management in Germany asked 166 male university students a series of questions to measure their emotional smarts....

OUR ABILITY to perceive visual scenes effortlessly depends on intelligent deployment of built-in knowledge about the external world. The key word here is “intelligent,” which raises the questions: Just how smart is the visual system? What is its IQ? For example, does the visual system know the laws of physics? Does it use inductive logic only (as many suspect), or can it perform deductions as well? How does it deal with paradoxes, conflicts or incomplete information?...

Astrophysicists who captured an image of the Big Bang’s afterglow—and confirmed the standard model of cosmology—won a US$3-million Breakthrough Prize on 3 December. The team behind NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) provided key evidence backing the theory that the cosmos is composed mainly of dark energy and dark matter, with a small serving of ordinary matter. “It is a well-deserved award for an amazing experiment,” says astrophysicist Andrew Jaffe at Imperial College London, who is a member of the team behind the rival European Space Agency’s Planck satellite....

The April 4, 2022 report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes it clear that it is “now or never” for the planet. We are “firmly on track toward an unlivable world,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in releasing the report. There’s every chance that global temperatures will soar by 3 degrees Celsius, twice as much as the agreed-upon 1.5 C limit. Unless we take drastic steps and cut down emissions by 43 percent within this decade, the full force of this existential threat will be upon us....

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is looking into another controversial tactic to fight climate change. This time, it’s carbon dioxide removal and sequestration. The term encompasses several techniques that pull greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and keep them from going back, thereby reducing warming. And scientists say the world needs to figure out what works and when to use it. “Can we pull it out again and stick it someplace where it won’t do any harm?...

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. In 2009, film director Alejandro Amenabar brought the story of Hypatia of Alexandria (c. 370-415 CE) to the screen through the feature film Agora. Years later, the movie continues to draw criticism from Christian writers for its depiction of early Christians even though these depictions are accurate....