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California regulators, trying to assess the true environmental cost of corn ethanol, are poised to declare that the biofuel cannot help the state reduce global warming. As they see it, corn is no better – and might be worse – than petroleum when total greenhouse gas emissions are considered. Such a declaration, to be considered later this week by the California Air Resources Board, would be a considerable blow to the corn-ethanol industry in the United States....

This article is from Hakai Magazine, a new online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. Daryl Fedje was feeling his age, kneeling in a waterlogged pit, trowel in hand, mud everywhere, water pooling a dirty brown in the low spots. It was a cold, grey April morning on the central British Columbia coast, with rain lashing the overhead tarp, and Fedje, an archaeologist at the Hakai Institute and the University of Victoria, and one of Canada’s leading researchers on the early human history of the Americas, was duelling with doubt....

Graphic by Jen Christiansen. Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Tens of thousands of near-earth objects—asteroids and comets—pass by our planet in regular orbits. A subset, known as potentially hazardous objects, could possibly hit us and are big enough to cause considerable damage if they did. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory tracks these worrisome rocks in awesome detail. For example, the diagram below shows the Earth’s position on February 7, 2011, and the five most recent close-approaches of hazardous objects leading up to that date....

Dennis and Merna Koula.(Credit:CBS News.com Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)Sometimes, even after a murder conviction, some see reasonable doubt that the conviction was a righteous one.Such is the case in the murder of Dennis and Merna Koula in La Cross, Wisc, a quiet community.Their son Eric was found guilty and is currently serving two consecutive life-sentences for the murder of the wealthy couple.It was Eric Koula who found the body. It was Eric Koula whose alibi didn’t stand up....

On a day marking the 20th anniversary of the notorious Exxon Valdez oil spill, environmentalists urged lawmakers to reinstate a ban on new offshore drilling for oil and gas in vast expanses of the outer continental shelf—the land that extends off of North America’s coasts under relatively shallow waters. These areas were largely off-limits to energy exploration from 1990 through last year, when former President George W. Bush lifted an executive order prohibiting oil and gas extraction and Congress let lapse a legislative moratorium on drilling there....

Mutations drive evolution. Subtle changes in the pairing of the chemical letters of DNA–adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine–produce new cells with different traits than their ancestors. The fundamental basis of such change is called a single nucleotide polymorphism, or a copying error in the long, chemical book of DNA. Now Japanese researchers have shown how environmentally damaged letters lead to transcription flaws and, ultimately, human diversity. Ultraviolet light, environmental chemicals, even the by-products of normal cellular metabolism all conspire to continually assault the DNA of humans and every other living thing....

The way we behave when threatened sometimes goes against conventional wisdom: we soften up. Andrew White, a PhD student at Arizona State University, and his colleagues analyzed data from 54 nations and found that the more a nation spent on its military (presumably a good index of perceived threat), the higher its people scored on self-report measures of how agreeable they were to others. This trend, published in the October 2012 issue of Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes, held all the way down to the individual level: People who believe the world is a dangerous place reported being more agreeable than those who don’t....

The three Land Rovers pause while John Flynn consults the device in his hand. “Is the GPS happy?” someone asks him. Flynn concludes that it is, and the caravan continues slowly through the bush, negotiating trails usually traversed by oxcart. We have been driving since seven this morning, when we left Madagascar’s capital city, Antananarivo. Now, with the afternoon’s azure sky melting into pink and mauve, the group is anxious to locate a suitable campsite....

Thomas Insel, a pioneer in the charge to reform psychiatric diagnoses, will step down as director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), he announced on September 15. Insel will take up a job with the Google Life Sciences group at Alphabet, the computer giant’s new parent company in Mountain View, California. There, Insel will expand the group’s medical technology efforts—which currently include development of a contact lens that monitors glucose in people with diabetes—to encompass mental health....

Here’s my conclusion: the only strong evidence we have that Oklahoma Senator James M. Inhofe isn’t a clown is that his car isn’t small enough. As I write in early December, the Copenhagen climate change conference has just begun. And Inhofe, that gleeful anarchist, says he is going to Copenhagen to try to sabotage the affair. Inhofe has famously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people....

It is difficult to find fault with a process that can create food from sunlight, water and air, but for many plants, there is room for improvement. Researchers have taken an important step towards enhancing photosynthesis by engineering plants with enzymes from blue-green algae that speed up the process of converting carbon dioxide into sugars. The results, published today in Nature, surmount a daunting hurdle on the path to boosting plant yields — a goal that is taking on increasing importance as the world’s population grows....

Rising temperatures have helped blunt plants’ ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere, according to a study published yesterday in Science. The amount of carbon soaked up by Earth’s plants and trees fell by roughly 1 percent, or 550 million metric tons, between 2000 and 2009. Researchers at the University of Montana say that global warming, large-scale droughts and an overall drying trend in the Southern Hemisphere contributed to the drop....

UNITED NATIONS – A move to ban international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna will go before the U.N. Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) for discussion and a possible vote, officials announced today. The CITES office in Geneva confirmed that Monaco has submitted a formal bid to add bluefin tuna to the Annex I list of threatened species and that the proposal will be part of the formal agenda at the next general conference in Doha, Qatar, in March 2010....

Have you ever wondered how long you might live? New research suggests that an important indicator of your probable life span may be your genes. Scientists have identified unique genetic signatures strongly associated with a long and healthy life, findings that could help to further the understanding of how certain genes may offer protection from common age-related diseases like cancer, dementia and cardiovascular disease. And one day the data might lead to the development of genetic tests to predict whether a person can expect to live into old age as well as guide intervention efforts to prevent age-related illness....

Attention city dwellers: There’s consolation for your cramped apartments and crowded subway cars. Your carbon footprint might be a quarter the size of your suburban counterparts, with their green lawns, separate kid rooms and drives to get groceries and coffee. But don’t be too smug, because the biggest cities also tend to have the most carbon-intensive suburbs, essentially wiping out the climate benefits achieved by many metropolitan areas, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley....

In the long hunt for water on Mars, researchers may have finally caught sight of flowing liquid. High-resolution photographs from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) show dark, transient features on slopes in several midlatitude locations in the southern hemisphere. The features have appeared in Mars’s southern spring across multiple years since the probe entered orbit in 2006, grow in length as they extend downhill, and then fade in late summer or early fall....

Before it became a crater of saurian doom, the space rock that ended the age of the dinosaurs most likely was a near-Earth object (NEO), an asteroid that occasionally came within striking distance of our planet as it orbited the sun. NASA and other space agencies are now developing ways to deflect and redirect asteroids should they approach, but those techniques will be useful only if we find dangerous NEOs before they find us....

“Pick the right night and you will hear them. A September night, perhaps, when a northwest wind has swept the clouds from the sky and the stars are out in full force. As midnight approaches, find a quiet spot away from the rumbles and groans of urban life and listen carefully. Soon you will hear soft chirps and whistles drifting down from the sky. These are the calls of migrating songbirds....

A team of Stanford University researchers, including former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, believes it has achieved the “holy grail” of lithium battery design: an anode of pure lithium that could boost the range of an electric car to 300 miles. Lithium-ion batteries are one of the most common types of rechargeable batteries on the market today. But most of the batteries—found in technologies like smartphones and electric cars—use an anode made of graphite or silicon....

Solution 1. The column player replaces A by 2. This forces the row player to play in the same row and therefore to replace B by 6 to satisfy the row constraint, yielding: 8 1 5 3 4 9 2 6 7 7 2 4 6 5 1 8 9 3 3 9 6 8 7 2 4 1 5 1 4 7 5 2 8 6 3 9 C 8 2 9 3 6 D E 1...