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A simple intervention can help Galapagos finches to stave off an insidious parasite. Offered insecticide-soaked cotton, birds from four finch species wove it into their nests and effectively stamped out an invasive nest fly, researchers report today in Current Biology. The fly Philornis downsi represents a serious threat to the iconic birds, whose speciation patterns were key to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Its larvae feed on blood from newly-hatched finches and have been known to kill all a year’s nestlings at a given field site....

BEIJING (Reuters) - China will jail people who eat rare animals for 10 years or more under a new interpretation of the criminal law, state media reported, as the government seeks to close a legal loophole and better protect the natural environment. China lists 420 species as rare or endangered, including the panda, golden monkeys, Asian black bears and pangolins, some or all of which are threatened by illegal hunting, environmental destruction and the consumption of animal parts, including for supposedly medicinal reasons....

LONDON (Reuters) - Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels will rise to a record 36 billion metric tons (39.683 billion tons) this year, a report by 49 researchers from 10 countries said, showing the failure of governments to rein in the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.The report by the Global Carbon Project, which compiles data from research institutes worldwide each year, was published in the journal Earth Systems Data Discussions on Tuesday....

In little more than half a century the average Chinese life span has almost doubled. Life expectancy in China is now 76 years, nearly on par with the U.S.’s 79 years. Yet this tremendous boon comes with a dark side: an aging population. China’s one-child policy throttled population growth so successfully that the proportion of elderly Chinese is now soaring. A 2011 report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences predicts that the percentage of the population that is 65 or older will triple between 2000 and 2050....

For much of the past two years, two thirds of all Web sites were susceptible to having their memory extracted by remote attackers—memory containing private information, passwords and encryption keys. The flaw, called Heartbleed, was the most serious Internet security flaw ever found. Heartbleed attacks would not have shown up in most sites’ logs, so we cannot be sure how widely it was exploited or what might have been leaked. When the flaw came to light earlier this year, the White House made an unusually clear and direct statement that no part of the U....

Dear EarthTalk: How does growing human population, and its resultant landscape changes, affect the flight paths of migratory birds that might carry diseases? —Ronnie Washines, Toppenish, Wash. As human population numbers grow, oceans of people seem to spread out into every conceivable environment—even the forests and estuaries used for eons by migratory birds as nutrient-rich stopovers on their longer annual journeys between feeding areas and birthing grounds. Of course, more human development means fewer habitats suitable for such birds of passage (and other wildlife) as we “pave paradise…” and put up parking lots....

Steve Jobs often swam against the tide of prevailing opinion. (“You can’t make a mouse without two buttons!” “You can’t make a computer without a floppy drive!” “You can’t make a cell phone without a swappable battery!”) He turned out to be right many times. Occasionally, though, his decisions took the industry into awkward directions from which we’ve never really recovered. Jobs was fixed, for example, on the idea of a cell phone without any keys....

The fourth in a series of stories on Bangladesh and climate migration. BHOMRA, Bangladesh – A high, heavily reinforced barbed wire fence cuts a jagged line through an otherwise empty field of tall grass and tamarind plants here. Climate change didn’t bring this fence, but it is providing a fresh reason for its existence and ongoing expansion. On this side of the fence, rising sea levels caused by climate change are beginning to inundate low-lying Bangladesh....

At 3 p.m., New York City is typically approaching its hottest time of the day. The city’s been steeping in late-afternoon sun for hours, heat building up between the densely packed buildings and lingering over the concrete sidewalks. The hum of window air conditioners hangs in the heavy air. As temperatures climbed toward their peak on a sunny Saturday afternoon last month, Martin Stute and Aboud Ezzeddine were criss-crossing upper Manhattan from the air-conditioned comfort of Stute’s Kia Niro....

A tree’s leaf, a blade of grass, a single algal cell: all make fuel from the simple combination of water, sunlight and carbon dioxide through photosynthesis. Now scientists say they have replicated—and improved on—that trick with their own “bionic leaf.” Chemist Daniel Nocera of Harvard University and his team joined forces with synthetic biologist Pamela Silver of Harvard Medical School and her team to craft a kind of living battery, which they call a bionic leaf for its melding of biology and technology....

What’s it take to make an international climate accord? Sift heaping handfuls of patience. Whip the voices of opposition until stiff peaks form. Let rise for two weeks every year in a cavernous convention center someplace; it should smell warm, sweaty and stale by the end. Add a dash—not much!—of progress. Almost 25 years ago United Nations delegates started cooking an international treaty to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at a level that avoids dangerous climate change....

Imagine the commute of the future: “The Jetsons,” or more “Blade Runner”? Will family sedans crisscross in blue skies, or will machines crawl past craggy skylines in perpetual night? Such visions are staples of the entertainment business but deservedly scarce in universities, government and industry. None have the crystal ball that shows which future technologies and behaviors – some of which would surely astonish today’s city slicker – have become routine....

Mysterious stars that incite their stellar companions to explode in spectacular supernovas have just been revealed — these culprits can be bloated red giants, researchers say. Supernovas are exploding stars that are bright enough to briefly outshine all the stars in their galaxies. They can occur when one star sheds gas onto a dying star known as a white dwarf, the dim fading core of a star that was once about the size of our sun....

Humans, chimpanzees and dogs can live in a space environment for but a few minutes before the air in their lungs expands, gas bubbles out of their blood and the saliva in their mouths begin to boil. But more fundamental organisms such as bacteria and lichen can tolerate the absence of pressure and searing cold. And now researchers have found that animals known as tardigrades, or water bears, can, too....

The crowd has quieted, but an electric energy from the packed grandstands fills the air. The diver stands atop the platform, aware of television cameras below that are broadcasting his every muscle twitch to millions of viewers worldwide. He can smell the chlorine wafting up from the diving pool 10 meters below. The texture of the platform feels rough beneath his feet. He takes a breath, makes his approach and jumps sharply upward....

For more than 30 years now, NASA’s deep-space probes have relied on radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), devices that use decaying plutonium 238 to warm thermocouples and generate electricity. Now the space agency is poised to replace those heavy, expensive and inefficient RTGs with a system that provides more power with much less radioactive fuel—technology based on a 19th-century invention. Patented in 1816 by an intellectually restless Scottish minister named Robert Stirling, the Stirling engine is simplicity itself: two chambers or cylinders, one cold and one hot, containing a “working fluid” (commonly air, helium or hydrogen) with a regenerator or heat exchanger between the two....

The U.S. National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecasts six to nine hurricanes—including as many as five major hurricanes with wind speeds above 111 miles (179 kilometers) per hour—this six-month season in the Atlantic, which officially begins on Sunday and ends November 30. Independent experts at Colorado State University in Fort Collins foresee much the same, making this a more active year than most for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic and Caribbean....

A NASA spacecraft charting the topography of the moon in exceptional detail has produced a catalogue of lunar craters that traces billions of years of impact history on the moon. The cratering record on the moon provides a proxy for similar impacts by interplanetary debris such as comets and asteroids on Earth, the effects of which have largely been erased by billions of years of erosion and geologic activity. The Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA), one of seven instruments that have circled the moon since June 2009 on board the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), bounces a laser beam off the lunar surface and times its return to gauge the elevation of the terrain below....

It was a momentous year in science: astronomers detected gravitational waves for the first time, Zika virus spread around the globe and drought accompanied war to fuel a mass migration of refugees in Syria. These were among the stories our editors felt were the most important of 2016, and we invite you to read the entire collection. But we also wanted to know which stories most captured our readers’ attention this year, so we looked at the data....

On May 19 the world met a most unlikely celebrity: the fossilized carcass of a housecat-size primate that lived 47 million years ago in a rain forest in what is now Germany. The specimen, a juvenile female, represents a genus and species new to science, Darwinius masillae, although the media-savvy researchers who unveiled her were quick to give her a user-friendly nickname, Ida. And in an elaborate public-relations campaign, in which the release of a Web site, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her in PLoS ONE, Ida’s significance was described in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin....