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Climate negotiators gathering in Germany this week are still flush with the success of the Paris Agreement two years ago. But as they begin assembling a rule book for ensuring that the national pledges made in Paris are fulfilled, there comes a hard dose of reality. Those pledges, which constrain greenhouse gas emissions from now to 2030, will only deliver a third of the cuts needed to put the world on track to keep warming below the promised 2 degrees Celsius.

Bulent Mutus is a micro mechanic.

But instead of fixing cars with wrenches and grease, the biochemist rolls up his sleeves and chops up and rebuilds proteins using microscopes and Petri dishes.

oving bus stops away from intersections would substantially reduce the amount of pollution bus riders are exposed to, UCLA scientists report today in the journal Environmental Pollution.

Research has shown that in many cities in the United States and internationally, bus riders frequently spend 15 to 25 minutes or more each way waiting for a bus.

The recent uproar about seats on a British Airways flight crawling with bedbugs is only one of the unintended consequences that urbanization worldwide has on evolution, says a University of Toronto researcher whose new study takes a comprehensive look at those consequences.
 
 “As we build cities, we have little understanding of how they are influencing organisms that live there,” says Marc Johnson, an associate professor of biology at U of T Mississauga who is also a director of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Urban Environments.

A Chalmers-led team of astronomers has for the first time observed details on the surface of an aging star with the same mass as the Sun. ALMA:s images show that the star is a giant, its diameter twice the size of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, but also that the star’s atmosphere is affected by powerful, unexpected shock waves. The research is published in Nature Astronomy on 30 October 2017.