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China will fail to meet its carbon and energy intensity targets unless it makes dramatic changes to its electricity grid, a groundbreaking new report finds. The study, two years in the making, finds that China’s grid is its “Achilles’ heel,” said lead author and Energy Transition Research Institute Research Director William Chandler. While newer and in many ways more technologically advanced than the U.S. grid, China’s system is nevertheless being built to perpetuate the use of coal and large hydropower projects....

One in five of us will do the unthinkable this summer: take a leak in the pool. The lazy act is more than gross, though. It results in toxic chemicals, albeit in very small amounts. “There’s this perception that peeing in a pool is okay because there’s chlorine, and that’s just not true,” says Ernest Blatchley, a chemical engineer at Purdue University. In a pool, chlorine’s job is to kill bacteria....

COLOMBO, Jan 1 (Reuters) - Flash floods and mudslides in Sri Lanka have killed at least 39 people and more than 1 million have had to flee their homes in the past two weeks, data from the island’s Disaster Management Center showed on Thursday. At least another 20 people have been injured and two are still missing after torrential rain, mostly in central Sri Lanka, the data showed. Thousands of hectares of crops, mainly the food staple rice, have been destroyed in the agricultural heartland of the North Central and Eastern provinces....

Robert Goldberg sags into his desk chair and gestures at the air. “Frankenstein monsters, things crawling out of the lab,” he says. “This the most depressing thing I’ve ever dealt with.” Goldberg, a plant molecular biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, is not battling psychosis. He is expressing despair at the relentless need to confront what he sees as bogus fears over the health risks of genetically modified (GM) crops....

It was 1924 when the 12-year-old boy was brought to the Moscow clinic for an evaluation. By all accounts, he was different from his peers. Other people did not interest him much, and he preferred the company of adults to that of children his own age. He never played with toys: He had taught himself to read by age 5 and spent his days reading everything he could instead. Thin and slouching, the boy moved slowly and awkwardly....

X-RAYS FROM TAPE Peeling adhesive tape can create nanosecond bursts of x-rays. The effect occurs when electrons from the stuck surface leap to the sticky side of the tape. They travel so fast that on impact with the adhesive side, they give off radiation. The x-rays appear only in near-vacuum conditions, however—air molecules slow down the electrons enough so that they produce just a faint glow. The discovery, which came to light in the October 23 Nature, could lead to inexpensive x-ray machines that do not require electricity....

One star dies, another is born. The remains of the old are gathered up, at least in some small measure, to become part of the new. That is the astronomical circle of life, the reason that stars have evolved through the eons, each generation incorporating new elements synthesized in the stars that came before. Unlike the earliest stars of hydrogen and helium, stars nowadays contain heavier elements passed down to them by their predecessors, such as carbon, iron and oxygen....

SAN FRANCISCO — NASA will launch a new Mars rover in 2020, agency officials announced Dec. 4. The unmanned rover’s chassis and landing system will be based heavily on NASA’s $2.5 billion Curiosity rover, which has been tooling around the Red Planet since August of this year, said John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science. “We have a whole new Mars mission, and I’m very excited about that,” Grunsfeld said Tuesday at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union....

Inside the human brain, branching neurons grow beside, around and on top of one another like trees in a dense forest. Scientists used to think that any neurons that wilted and died from injury or disease were gone forever because the brain had no way to replace those cells. By the 1990s, however, most neuroscientists had accepted that the adult brain cultivates small gardens of stem cells that can turn into mature neurons....

Young brains are plastic, meaning their circuitry can be easily rewired to promote learning. By adulthood, however, the brain has lost much of its plasticity and can no longer readily recover lost function after, say, a stroke. Now scientists have successfully restored full youthful plasticity in adult mice by transplanting young neurons into their brain—curing their severe visual impairments in the process. In a groundbreaking study published in May in Neuron, a team of neuroscientists led by Sunil Gandhi of the University of California, Irvine, transplanted embryonic mouse stem cells into the brains of other mice....

By Lisa Rapaport NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Anti-bullying policies in most U.S. states aim to protect kids against abuse from their peers in school and online, but their effectiveness varies widely depending on where students live, a study suggests. Researchers analyzed survey data on bullying from almost 62,000 students in grades 9 through 12 to see how their experiences varied based on the type of laws in their home state....

Nearly 4.3 billion kilometers from Earth, and most of the way to Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is in danger of missing out on half of its mission. Project managers face a looming deadline to identify an icy object in the outer Solar System for the probe to fly by after it passes Pluto. A visit to a Kuiper belt object, or KBO, was always meant to be a key part of New Horizons’ US$700-million journey, which began in 2006....

One of the biggest issues of our time is energy: where to get it, how to save it, and how it relates to our climate, food and water. Naturally, we cover this topic in our pages in multiple ways, and from many angles, in practically every edition. In our January issue, for instance, we ran an interview with clean technology investor Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a member of our board of advisers [“In Search of the Radical Solution,” interview by Mark Fischetti]....

Earth’s robust magnetic field protects the planet and its inhabitants from the full brunt of the solar wind, a torrent of charged particles that on less shielded planets such as Venus and Mars has over the ages stripped away water reserves and degraded their upper atmospheres. Unraveling the timeline for the emergence of that magnetic field and the mechanism that generates it—a dynamo of convective fluid in Earth’s outer core—can help constrain the early history of the planet, including the interplay of geologic, atmospheric and astronomical processes that rendered the world habitable....

The same molecules that endow naked mole rats with springy, wrinkled skin also seem to prevent the homely rodents from contracting cancer. Research published on Nature’s website today identifies a sugary cellular secretion that stops the spread of would-be tumors. Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber), which are more closely related to porcupines than rats, are freaks of nature. The short-sighted creatures spend their lives in subterranean colonies in the service of a single breeding queen — H....

People who are thinking about getting inked are often told, “a tattoo is for life.” Etched into the layer of skin just below the epidermis, they are notoriously difficult to remove. And the laser surgery method for doing so is costly, time-consuming and—often—has far from perfect results. A new discovery published Tuesday in The Journal of Experimental Medicine may eventually change the situation: It fleshes out the cellular processes that make tattoo ink so persistent, and offers a new strategy for potentially removing it more effectively....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. People around the world are being invited to learn how to hunt for planets, using two new online apps devised by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin and UC Santa Cruz. The apps use data from the Automated Planet Finder (APF), Lick Observatory’s newest telescope. The APF is one of the first robotically operated telescopes monitoring stars throughout the entire sky....

There are currently 184,000 troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, about 15 percent of whom have suffered brain injuries from concussions, physical injury or blast exposure. A new survey of about 1,000 soldiers with these injuries suggests that the effects can be lasting: Nearly all of them suffered from headaches, according to research released this week by the American Academy of Neurology. The study, led by Capt. Brett Theeler, chief resident of the Madigan Army Medical Center Neurology Clinic at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Wash....

More than million years ago, around the same time some primates on Earth began to master fire, a comet drifting at the outer edge of our solar system felt the gentle gravitational tug of a dwarf planet or a passing star and began to fall toward the sun. It has been falling ever since, falling as the primates developed language, domesticated plants, built cities and launched rockets and robots into outer space....

What’s in a brain? Neurons, chemical messengers, electric signals—and a lot of empty space. The space between cells takes up a fifth of the volume inside our brains. And although all our thoughts and mental functions traffic through this vital region, scientists are just beginning to unlock its secrets. Neurobiologists Charles Nicholson of New York University and Eva Syková of the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Prague have developed ways to probe the unseen intercellular space in the brain....