Science

Asia's flood-prone megacities should fund major drainage, water recycling and waste reduction projects to stem deluges and secure clean supply for their booming populations, experts said Sunday.

The board of Yahoo! has agreed to a deal to purchase the popular blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Because of the design changes in the new Google Maps, v4 of the Maps API must be in the pipeline. I expect however that the release is some way off. Inspired by the new index card effect in Google Maps I decided to have a little Sunday hack to see if I could create something similar. Here's the result, Not the New Google Maps. First off to add the new look map base layer it is a simple process to add google.maps.visualRefresh to the javascript for the map. Initially I decided to replace information windows with a slide-down index card. It was simple enough to create a div element for the index card and use jQuery to create a slide-down and slide-up effect for the card. Then it was just a matter of using document.getElementById('divName').innerHTML and a call to open the card index, inside the marker's event listener. After achieving that however I decided to remove the example marker from the finished map. One of the really impressive new features in the new Google Maps is the reverse geo-coding that happens when you click on the map. When the user clicks on a location on the map a card opens showing the location's address and a small thumbnail of the Street View available. So I decided to use my index card design to achieve something similar. When you click on the map I geo-code the location and add a little static Street View to the slide-down index card. If I get the time it should be a simple enough process to add a function so that when the user clicks on the static Street View the map is replaced with the full interactive Street View.

Residents of Manhattan will not just sweat harder from rising temperatures in the future, says a new study; many may die. Researchers say deaths linked to warming climate may rise some 20 percent by the 2020s, and, in some worst-case scenarios, 90 percent or more by the 2080s. Higher winter temperatures may partially offset heat-related deaths by cutting cold-related mortality—but even so, annual net temperature-related deaths might go up a third. The study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, was done by a team at Columbia University's Earth Institute and the Mailman School of Public Health.

A global warming "pause" over the past decade may invalidate the harshest climate change predictions for the next 50 to 100 years, a study said Sunday—though levels remain in the danger zone.

Scientists look at past climates to learn about climate change and the ability to simulate it with computer models. One region that has received a great deal of attention is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, the vast pool of warm water stretching along the equator from Africa to the western Pacific Ocean.

One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is that when you make things extremely small—one nanometer is about five atoms wide, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair—they are going to become more perfect.

A new study shows how complex biochemical transformations may have been possible under conditions that existed when life began on the early Earth. The study shows that RNA is capable of catalyzing electron transfer under conditions similar to those of the early Earth. Because electron transfer, the moving of an electron from one chemical species to another, is involved in many biological processes – including photosynthesis, respiration and the reduction of RNA to DNA – the study's findings suggest that complex biochemical transformations may have been possible when life began.

The UK astronaut Tim Peake is given a date to fly to the International Space Station.

The latest data on the climate suggests it will warm slightly less, and more slowly, than expected – giving us a chance to avoid the worst effects