Science News

Editor's Note: Vienna, Austria-based science writer Chelsea Wald is taking part in a two-week Marine Biological Laboratory journalism fellowship at Toolik Field Station , an environmental research post inside the Arctic Circle. To see the current conditions in Toolik, check out the Webcam .

Doing science in the Arctic is hard. Polar field researchers can spend most of their time surviving, with little time left over for science. But that's not the case at Toolik Field Station, I discovered during my two-week stay, which ended last Thursday. There, I was never hungry, rarely cold, and always in good company. No wonder some scientists affectionately call Toolik "the Hilton of the North." [More]

When it comes to elections, sometimes we vote with our heads and sometimes with our hearts. But scientists at Stanford say we might also be voting with our pompoms. Because they’ve found that our behavior at the polls is influenced by the results of local sporting events, work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . [Andrew Healy, Neil Malhotra and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo, http://bit.ly/cURQ2E ] [More]

By Vincent Fribault

PAYERNE, Switzerland, July 7 (Reuters) - A solar-powered aircraft designed to fly round the clock without traditional aviation fuel or polluting emissions headed on Wednesday into its crucial first night flight.

By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has told Texas pollution regulators that flexible permits issued by the state since 1994 for refineries, chemical plants and power plants did not meet the standards set by the U.S. Clean Air Act.

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. [More]

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - Emails stolen from one of the world's leading climate change research centers contained no evidence to undermine the case for manmade global warming, a report found on Wednesday.

How much money do you put away each month toward retirement? Maybe you sock away all you can, already dreaming of that Florida condo. Or maybe you can’t even imagine where you’ll be then, what you’ll want to use the money for, even what you’ll be like: when you think about yourself far in the future, it’s almost like thinking about someone else. A growing body of work suggests that the more you feel your future self is really you, the more you’ll put in his or her--whoops, your--bank account.

When making decisions, we often treat our future self the way we would treat another person, found a study in 2008 by Princeton psychologist Emily Pronin. People in the study often shied away from doing something helpful but unpleasant when they had to do it right at that moment. But when their help was needed a few months or a year down the line, they were more likely to sign up--just as likely as they were to suggest that someone else should help out.

This spring I was stranded in Europe for a week, a minor victim of Mother Nature, as most airports on the continent were closed after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland. This remote natural event did not result in a huge human death toll but still caused hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue for almost all the world’s major airlines. More important, it disrupted millions of people’s lives.

Such is the nature of our modern interconnected society, where a catastrophe in one corner of the world can nonetheless affect almost immediately the livelihood and well-being of people around the globe.

One of the world's only two populations of North Pacific right whale ( Eubalaena japonica ) has declined to the point where it will probably not survive. [More]