Heneghan covered the casino beat for the Press of Atlantic City for 20 years before moving to the Casino Control Commission in 1996. A little more than two years ago, when I was an intern at a now shuttered website called The Awl, I went out to Atlantic City to cover the Trump Taj Mahal’s last weekend before it closed for good. “Atlantic City in particular,” said Buchanan, “but even New Jersey writ large, are expected to experience more sea level rise than the global mean.”

With its proximity to the legendary growing regions of Northern California, the center can start to quantify this historically secretive industry, measuring its toll on the environment and looking at how existing rules affect the growers themselves. So for the past few years Van Butsic, codirector of the Cannabis Research Center, and his colleagues have been sifting through satellite images to pinpoint those unaccounted-for farms. “I think that the environmental impact of the additional plastics is really something that has not been addressed at any level, yet there are in California mandates about plastic bags and other plastics in the environment,” says Joanna Cedar, industry analyst for CannaCraft, a California cannabis producer.

Writing Fingerprints of God, my 2009 book about the science of spirituality, gave me an excuse to ask a question that I never openly considered before leaving Christian Science, one that was unusually freighted: Is there any scientific evidence, anything beyond the realm of anecdote, that prayer heals? Prayer studies are a “wild goose chase that violate everything we know about the universe,” Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith, told me: “There are no plausible mechanisms that account for how somebody’s thoughts or prayers can influence the health of another person. Like most brain processes, meditation or contemplative prayer involves many areas of the brain, from the brain stem to the prefrontal cortex.

Radio images made from VLBI observations soon revealed that the sources at the centers of radio galaxies are “microscopic” by galaxy standards, even smaller than the distance between the sun and our nearest star. By matching the positions of these stars at the two wavebands, the radio position of Sgr A* can be transferred to infrared images with an accuracy of 0.001 seconds of arc. Finding that the compact radio source Sgr A* is at the precise location of the unseen mass and is motionless provides even more compelling evidence for a supermassive black hole.

In a 2012 study, for example, the negative effects of cycling in 89-degree heat were partly erased when the thermometer in the room was rigged to read 79 degrees. And several recent studies have explored using things like menthol that create a perception of coolness to enhance performance in the heat. The heat pad was turned up to about 104 degrees, just a few degrees above normal body temperature.

Military use of dolphins dates to the early 1970s, when the navy deployed the animals during the Vietnam War. The navy also realized they could train dolphins to detect what the military perceived as threats, and they taught the animals to find underwater mines and spot foreign objects in the water, such as remotely operated spy vehicles and enemy divers. Their ongoing research with the navy includes studying the impacts of anthropogenic noise on the echolocation and hearing of navy dolphins (and sea lions, another military sea mammal), which informs efforts to reduce negative impacts on wild marine mammals.

Last week, a study in the scientific journal Nature Medicine that opened a door to early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease hinted that Cassandra’s regret might soon become an uncomfortably familiar phenomenon. Furthermore, testing of general populations might mean that people who actually end up never contracting a particular disease are identified as high risk. “In medicine, there is a distinction between early testing for diseases where there is treatment or prevention, and those where there is not,” says Julian Savulescu, who researches various issues around medicine, ethics and responsibility at Oxford University.

Image: NOAA NCEI
Earth’s north magnetic pole, a wandering point where magnetic field lines vertically enter and exit our planet, has been acting weird lately. Earth’s magnetic field has been weakening in recent decades, but the north pole’s shift does not seem to be having a significant impact on that trend. Read More: Scientists Can’t Fix Map of Earth’s Magnetic Field Thanks to the Government Shutdown
Given that the WMM team is keeping tabs on the poles, and making sure models are up to date, the pole’s movement is not likely to be a problem in the years to come.

And in the race to find alternatives, one group of scientists has created a vast database cataloguing the bacteria in our guts. Eventually, the hope is to make the database cover every bacteria found in the gut – but this poses some significant challenges. “We reckon [the database] probably represents 20 per cent of all the gut bacteria, but we say that with a lot of caveats,” explains Finn.

The researchers, from University College London, used estimates of population decline during the 16th century to estimate how much farmland was reclaimed by forests during that century. All that new vegetation required a lot of carbon dioxide, and so much CO2 was pulled out of the atmosphere to fuel these growing plants that it ended up cooling the earth.Starting in the late 1500s, the entire earth went through a minor cooling period called the Little Ice Age. The immediate cause of the ice age was a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide by around 8 parts per million.According to the recent study, the additional forests in the Americas caused around half of that CO2 loss, around 5 parts per million.