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By Melissa GaskillScientists have revealed that a mammoth effort to move thousands of turtle eggs from beaches around the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill may have saved almost 15,000 of the reptiles.Between 25 June and 18 August, staff from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) moved more than 25,000 sea turtles eggs by road from northern beaches on the Gulf of Mexico to Kennedy Space Center on Florida’s east coast....

By Jonathan Allen NEW YORK (Reuters) - The number of great white sharks off the U.S. Atlantic Coast appears to have increased since the early 1990s after conservation measures were introduced to halt their decline, a U.S. government scientist said on Saturday. Scientists for the National Marine Fisheries Service presented the findings in a study published this month in the PLOS ONE online journal. Tobey Curtis, one of the government scientists who worked on the study, said in an interview his team could only capture trends in shark abundance and the study could not be used to estimate the total number of sharks in the Atlantic’s northwest region, which extends from the U....

When Arnecia Hawkins enrolled at Arizona State University last fall, she did not realize she was volunteering as a test subject in an experimental reinvention of American higher education. Yet here she was, near the end of her spring semester, learning math from a machine. In a well-appointed computer lab in Tempe, on Arizona State’s desert resort of a campus, she and a sophomore named Jessica were practicing calculating annuities. Through a software dashboard, they could click and scroll among videos, text, quizzes and practice problems at their own pace....

In a study that involved teaching monkeys to associate Arabic numerals with their corresponding quantities, German researchers fingered the prefrontal cortex as the part of the mammalian brain that is responsible for relating symbols with abstract concepts. The finding was surprising to the Andreas Nieder, head of the Primate NeuroCognition Laboratory at the University of Tübingen, and his graduate student Ilka Diester, who figured that the intraparietal sulcus, a lateral region in the rear brain, handled this task....

It matters how we respond in these moments. As Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall wrote in this magazine in 2019, the “social transmission of knowledge is at the heart of culture and science.” In a large-scale online social network experiment conducted in 2018, Doug Guilbeault and Damon Centola, both then at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, confirmed that power. When smokers and nonsmokers collaboratively evaluated antismoking messages, the smokers were more likely to acknowledge the harms of tobacco use than the smokers who evaluated the messages on their own....

Tiny, jumping bits of DNA are looking less like genomic junk and more like significant players in mammalian evolution, according to a new analysis. Researchers have uncovered more than 10,000 short stretches of what may be functional DNA in parts of the human genome with no obvious role—the so-called junk DNA that makes up 95 percent of the genome. The segments appear to be fragments of transposons, pieces of DNA capable of copying themselves and inserting into new locations, up to millions of times....

Somewhere in the highlands of Afghanistan, a hungry fox pounces on a tasty-looking leopard gecko. But the lizard has a get-out-of-jail-free card: a detachable tail. The dropped appendage flails around long enough to distract the fox, allowing the gecko itself to run off and hide. Leopard geckos are one of a few lizard species that possess this self-amputation ability, known as autotomy. The technique is effective, but the tail can account for about a quarter of the lizard’s body mass....

Graphene, the wonder material that earned two researchers the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics and that has been the subject of countless scientific studies and news articles, has certainly spent some time in the limelight. Now it may take center stage under the microscope. Essentially a one-atom-thick slice of graphite, graphene is the thinnest form of carbon. The material has attracted attention for its strength, transparency and appealing electrical properties....

Jobs, national security and climate change were all part of an urgent appeal at an emotional summit yesterday on Capitol Hill to keep America’s nuclear fleet running. “We are supposed to be adding zero carbon sources, not subtracting or simply replacing by building to just kind of tread water,” said Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz. Nuclear energy provides almost two-thirds of the United States’ clean electricity. With only five new reactors under construction after a 30-year pause, the country’s 99 existing nuclear reactors aren’t getting any younger....

When I met briefly with President Obama on Wednesday, he assured me the environment was a “priority.” But there’s just one niggling thing that doesn’t quite jibe for me. First, About the Meeting It all started on Monday. I got a call from the White House Council on Environmental Quality — the president was coming to Raleigh, North Carolina, to make a speech that would touch on energy issues and would I like to attend and have a “meet and greet” with him....

By Jane Wardell POWRANNA Australia (Reuters) - Thousands of Black Angus bulls snort steam gently into the frigid early morning air at Tasmania’s largest cattle feedlot as they jostle for space at a long grain trough. The pitch black cattle, blending into their muddy surroundings and stretching as far as the eye can see, are being fattened up for the Japanese market where marbled Angus beef is in high demand. These bulls at the feedlot owned by Japan’s Aeon Co Ltd book an even higher premium, thanks to Tasmania’s status as the only Australian state that bans genetically modified food crops and animal feed....

Innovation matters in an enormous variety of professions. It elevates the careers of chefs, university presidents, psychotherapists, police detectives, journalists, teachers, engineers, architects, attorneys and surgeons, among other professionals. The contributions of creative thought can directly translate into career advancement as well as financial rewards. In an unfavorable economic climate, raising your creative game may even mark the difference between survival and failure. Psychologists broadly define creativity as the purposeful generation and implementation of a novel idea....

Editor’s Note (12/30/20): Today health officials in Colorado confirmed the first case of a new mutated form of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S., and said the state had a potential second case as well. Scientists, as noted in our story below, continue to find evidence this new variant appears more transmissible than the original form. Yet it does not appear to cause more severe disease. And the newly-authorized vaccines seem very effective against it....

The United States joined Saudi Arabia to derail a U.N. resolution that sought to improve the world’s understanding of potential efforts to lace the sky with sunlight-reflecting aerosols or use carbon-catching fans. The two countries were joined by Brazil in blocking the resolution at the U.N. Environment Assembly conference in Nairobi, Kenya, earlier this week. The measure asked the world’s decisionmaking body on the environment to commission a report outlining research and planning related to carbon dioxide removal and solar radiation management....

When you’re in an unexplored wilderness, you’d better be quiet, because you never know whether there might be dangerous predators lurking. Unfortunately, Earth has not been following this cautionary principle so far: we’ve been broadcasting radio waves into space for more than a century. If there are technological civilizations within a hundred light-years that monitor their sky with radio telescopes similar to ours, then they may already know about our existence....

Ask the average American about chlamydia, and you will probably evoke an uneasy cringe. Most people think immediately of one of the world’s most common sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). But the term actually refers to an entire genus of tiny bacteria that can ignite a variety of serious illnesses. Ask a poor mother in Africa about chlamydia, and she may tell you that flies transmitting this infection gave her two young children the painful eye condition known as conjunctivitis....

A group of chemicals found in household plastics and medical supplies is linked to higher rates of diabetes in women – up to double the rate for women with the highest levels, according to new research led by Harvard scientists. Blacks and Mexican Americans and women living in poverty are exposed to the highest levels of some of these compounds, called phthalates, the scientists reported. Whether these chemicals actually cause diabetes in women, however, remains unclear....

“Your brain is in its 60s,” Ryuta Kawashima announced. The disembodied head of the neuroscientist from Tohoku University in Japan wagged on the Nintendo screen and admonished: “If your brain is older than you, you should take note!” Miffed, this 34-year-old biophysics Ph.D. candidate decided to do something about it. I would train my brain daily. With many studies emphasizing the benefits of mental exercise for cognitive health, I knew I was not alone in my quest for a sharper mind....

How good are you at multi-tasking? The way you answer that question may tell you more than you think. According to recent research, the better people think they are at multitasking, the worse they actually are at it. And the more that you think you are good at it, the more likely you are to multi-task when driving. Maybe the problem of distracted driving has less to do with the widespread use of smartphones and more to do with our inability to recognize our own limits....

More than one-third of the oil that spewed into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill never made it to the surface. Scientists have been trying to locate the missing 2 million barrels since. Some have suggested that the oil was consumed by microbes or settled onto the sea floor. A study published on October 27 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports that a significant fraction of the spill was deposited in patches across at least 3,200 square kilometers of deep-sea sediments — an area as much as 20 to 100 times larger than previous estimates had suggested....