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5 articles from ScienceNOW

California’s move to phase out gas-powered cars could spark battery innovations

California, known for leading the United States in climate regulations, dropped a bombshell last month: By 2035, the state will ban sales of new gasoline powered cars and light trucks. Most new car sales are expected to shift to battery-powered electric vehicles (EVs). But along with high prices and modest range, current EVs have another big drawback: They are slow to recharge. Whereas...

Twisty device explores alternative path to fusion

Is the search for fusion energy, long dominated by doughnut-shaped devices called tokamaks, about to undergo a shape shift? Just as ITER, the world’s largest tokamak—and at tens of billions of dollars the most expensive—nears completion in the hills of southern France, a much smaller testbed with a twistier geometry will start throttling up to full power in Germany. If the...

You’ve spotted a flaw in a top journal’s paper. Good luck getting your critique published

More than one-third of the highest impact scientific journals do not offer to publish outsiders’ critiques of the papers they publish, a study has found. The practice runs counter to recommendations from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), to which most of those journals belong, and to calls from scholars for journals to be transparent and responsive when their papers...

Europe’s energy crisis hits science

Soon after Jessica Dempsey became director of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) in December 2021, she was forced to focus not on the stars, but on the electric bill. ASTRON operates the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR), which relies on large computer clusters to process radio astronomy data. They consume about 2000 megawatt-hours per year—the equivalent of 800...

World’s oldest amputation: Foot removed 31,000 years ago—without modern antibiotics or painkillers

Some 31,000 years ago in the misty rainforests of the island of Borneo, stone tool met bone and a limb was severed—but a young life was saved. Researchers have found evidence for the earliest known surgical amputation, tens of thousands of years before the advent of modern surgical tools, antibiotics, or painkillers. The findings illuminate both the medical expertise and...