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Delegates from 193 nations are meeting in Nagoya, Japan, this week. On their agenda is a proposal for a moratorium on field experiments in potential geoengineering solutions for global warming. It is a continuation of a controversial debate among the group, usually focused on discussions of ensuring the survival of endangered species and the loss of key habitats. They are parties to the U.N. Convention on Biodiversity. A draft agenda for the meeting, dated Oct....

Working memory—our ability to store pieces of information temporarily—is crucial both for everyday activities like dialing a phone number as well as for more taxing tasks like arithmetic and accurate note-taking. The strength of working memory is often measured with cognitive tests, such as repeating lists of numbers in reverse order or recalling sequences of dots on a screen. For children, performance on working memory assessments is considered a strong predictor for future academic performance....

By Heidi LedfordAfter a ten-year hiatus, the chimpanzees of the Alamogordo Primate Facility in New Mexico are being called back to duty. The 186 chimps, already grizzled veterans of medical research, will be pulled from an un official retirement and sent back into the lab by the end of 2011, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced last month. But the decision has brought to a head a simmering debate about the use of chimpanzees for medical research in the United States – a practice finally banned by the European Union earlier this month....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will raise standards for the production of cement, batteries, leather and heavy metals as part of its efforts to cut air, water and soil pollution, the environment ministry said on Friday.Beijing, facing growing public anger over smog, contaminated food and unclean water, has said it will tackle the environmental costs of more than three decades of unbridled growth.It has promised to get tough with under-regulated industries such as cement, iron and steel and coal but the central government has traditionally struggled to impose its will on powerful industrial sectors and local governments....

For $1 billion over the next 40 years, the U.S. could develop 100 gigawatts (a gigawatt equals one billion watts) of electricity generation that emits no air pollution and pumps out power to the grid even more reliably than coal-fired power plants, according to scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now Google.org—the charitable wing of the search engine giant—has chipped in nearly $11 million for this renewable resource: so-called geothermal power, or tapping the Earth’s heat to make electricity....

By Natalie Grover and Bill Berkrot Merck & Co’s immunotherapy Keytruda chalked up another approval on Tuesday as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the cancer medicine can be used to treat children and adults who carry a specific genetic feature regardless of where the disease originated. It is the first time the agency has approved a cancer treatment based solely on a genetic biomarker. “Until now, the FDA has approved cancer treatments based on where in the body the cancer started - for example, lung or breast cancers,” said Richard Pazdur, head of oncology products for the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research....

Big dumps of powder snow are a precious gift in the best of times around the West, where 40 or 50 feet can fall during a winter, forming frozen mountain water towers that slowly melt and sustain the region through hot, dry summers with life-giving water. When the snow falls faster than the mountains can hold it, though, big storms can also be deadly. During the first week of February, avalanches killed 14 people across the United States, the highest weekly avalanche death toll in more than 100 years....

A recent study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison offers one of the most detailed records of the variation in temperature between cities and the surrounding rural areas, known as the urban heat island effect. Jason Schatz and Christopher Kucharik of the Nelson Institute wanted a data set that would accurately reflect how temperatures varied in Madison at the neighborhood level. They mounted 151 temperature sensors on telephone poles in areas with varying levels of building density....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). About 4 billion years ago, molecules began to make copies of themselves, an event that marked the beginning of life on Earth. A few hundred million years later, primitive organisms began to split into the different branches that make up the tree of life. In between those two seminal events, some of the greatest innovations in existence emerged: the cell, the genetic code and an energy system to fuel it all....

It was the winter of 1997-1998 when the granddaddy of El Niños—the one by which all other El Niños are judged—vaulted the climate term to household name status. It had such a noticeable impact on U.S. weather that it appeared everywhere from news coverage of mudslides in Southern California to Chris Farley’s legendary sketch on “Saturday Night Live.” Basically, it was the “polar vortex” of the late ‘90s. So it’s no wonder that it is the touchstone event that people think of when they hear that name....

The poem “Maud Muller” by John Greenleaf Whittier aptly ends with the line, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’” What if you had gone for the risky investment that you later found out made someone else rich, or if you had had the guts to ask that certain someone to marry you? Certainly, we’ve all had instances in our lives where hindsight makes us regret not sticking our neck out a bit more....

By Chris Doughty, University of Oxford As recently as 12,000 years ago, much of the world looked like an African savanna. South America teemed with large animals which overlapped with stone age humans, including several species of elephant-like creatures, giant ground sloths, and armadillo-like creatures the size of a small car. Skeleton of Megatherium, the giant tree sloth. Image: Ballista In South America, most nutrients originate in the Andes mountain range and are washed into the forests through the river system....

From Nature magazine When the British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans discovered the 4,000-year-old Palace of Minos on Crete in 1900, he saw the vestiges of a long-lost civilization whose artefacts set it apart from later Bronze-Age Greeks. The Minoans, as Evans named them, were refugees from Northern Egypt who had been expelled by invaders from the South about 5,000 years ago, he claimed. Modern archaeologists have questioned that version of events, and now ancient DNA recovered from Cretan caves suggests that the Minoan civilization emerged from the early farmers who settled the island thousands of years earlier....

Researchers from the US have demonstrated a new catalyst support structure allowing two incompatible catalysts to work in tandem. The work mimics nature’s strategy of compartmentalising reactions and may open up new avenues for one pot syntheses for multi-step reactions. One pot reactions are attractive because several steps take place in one vessel, in the same solvent. This reduces time and waste associated with purification between steps. However, catalysts for different stages of the synthesis may interfere if mixed together, preventing the desired product from forming....

There are more than 50,000 known human genetic maladies that have, in most cases, few good treatments and no cure. Now researchers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT have developed a new tool that would theoretically make it possible to correct the genetic errors behind about 15,000 of these illnesses—including sickle-cell disease, cystic fibrosis and several forms of congenital deafness and blindness. Standard gene-editing tools, such as the well-known CRISPR–Cas9 system, function like scissors; they can cut an offending gene from a strand of DNA....

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S., Gibbons says. The World Health Organization estimates that in developed countries, roughly a quarter of male deaths and nearly a tenth of female deaths can be attributed to smoking. Cigarette smoke contains 69 known carcinogens and it increases risks for most forms of cancer, particularly of the lung, kidney, larynx, head, neck, bladder, esophagus, pancreas and stomach. Smoking also increases blood pressure and risk of heart disease as well as decreases good HDL cholesterol....

Ever since their discovery in the 1960s, ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays have captivated scientists, who wonder where they come from. Like all cosmic rays, they are arguably misnamed: they are not “rays” of radiation but rather subatomic particles, such as protons or even entire nuclei, zipping through space. Such ultrahigh energies come from ultrahigh speeds, approaching that of light itself. To be considered “ultrahigh,” a cosmic ray must carry on the order of a quintillion electron volts, or 1,000 peta-electron volts (PeV), of kinetic energy—about one hundredth of what would be required to tap out a single character on a keyboard....

In an increasingly hot and crowded world, clean water is becoming a precious commodity. Two thirds of the global population will have problems accessing fresh water by 2025, and removing salt and contaminants from the oceans and groundwater is one way to slake humanity’s thirst. Today’s large desalination plants, though, cost millions of dollars to build. Most use reverse osmosis, which forces seawater through salt-blocking membranes. The required electricity accounts for up to half of a plant’s expenses, and the process leaves behind a supersalty, chemical-laced soup that can harm local ecosystems....

Nearly a year has passed since Rebecca Knickmeyer first met the participants in her latest study on brain development. Knickmeyer, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine in Chapel Hill, expects to see how 30 newborns have grown into crawling, inquisitive one-year-olds, using a battery of behavioural and temperament tests. In one test, a child’s mother might disappear from the testing suite and then reappear with a stranger....

Since launching in January 2018, Time’s Up has worked swiftly to tackle sexual harassment and gender inequity in entertainment, tech, and advertising. Now, the nonprofit is setting its sights on another big industry: health care. Time’s Up announced Thursday that it’s launching Time’s Up Healthcare, a new affiliate that aims to tackle discrimination, harassment, and inequality across the health care industry. Dozens of health care providers—from surgeons and psychiatrists to nurses and medical students—joined together to found the organization....