Author: John Timmer

Even with decades of melting, much of the world's water lies trapped in ice that sits on land. If Antarctic ice melted entirely, it's estimated that ocean levels would rise by roughly 60 meters—a nearly incomprehensible figure.

But a lot of it wouldn't reach the ocean by melting. Instead, large areas of the Antarctic ice sheet sit on rock that's below sea level. Were the ocean to reach these sheets, the ice would break up and float off while melting, a process that could raise sea levels relatively suddenly. Now, researchers have performed a catalog of all of the ice that empties into the ocean in Antarctica, allowing us to identify those that pose the largest threat of rapid sea-level rise.

You can view Antarctica as having four types of ice. Inland, there are large ice sheets, some of which sit at sea level, others below. Some of the ice in these sheets flows to the coast through the exit glaciers, which often pass through narrow valleys on their way to the coast. At the coast, you'll find the third type: permanent floating ice shelves, which can extend for miles into the ocean. Beyond those, you will find seasonal ice, which expands in the southern winter but contracts again when summer arrives.

Just about everyone who has experienced urban living also has experienced some unwanted urban visitors: cockroaches. These agile beasts can make their way into locations that seem sealed off from the world outside the apartment. When found, they scramble out of sight with remarkable speed.

Researchers have subjected cockroaches to obstacle courses and full-body stress tests that would turn lesser animals to jello. The results show that despite their hard exoskeleton, roaches are remarkably flexible and use that flexibility to navigate spaces that are a fraction of their normal body size. Inspired by their results, the authors have built the first generation of a robot series based on cockroach mechanics.

We tend to portray exoskeletons as hard, rigid surfaces. And compared to skin, they are. But as anyone who has ever smashed a roach will tell you, they don't break with a crispy, snapping sound—it's more of a squish. To find out just how much give the exoskeletons have, a new paper by authors Kaushik Jayarama and Robert Full of Berkeley studied the American cockroach. "We selected the American cockroach, Periplaneta americana, because of its high speed, maneuverability, robustness, and tenacity to enter and leave spaces," they write.

Even when a culture leaves behind extensive written records, it can be hard to understand their knowledge of technology and the natural world. Written records are often partial, and writers may have been unaware of some technology or simply considered it unremarkable. That's why the ancient world can still offer up surprises like the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient mechanical computer that highlighted the Greeks' knowledge of math, astronomy, and the mechanical tech needed to tie them together.

It took several years after the discovery for the true nature of the Antikythera Mechanism to be understood. And now something similar has happened for the Babylonians. Clay tablets, sitting in the British Museum for decades, show that this culture was able to use sophisticated geometry to track the orbit of Jupiter, relying on methods that in some ways pre-figure the development of calculus centuries later.

We already knew that the Babylonians tracked the orbits of a variety of bodies. There are roughly 450 written tablets that describe the methods and calculations that we're aware of, and they date from 400 to 50 BCE. Most of the ones that describe how to calculate orbital motion, in the words of Humboldt University's Mathieu Ossendrijver, "can be represented as flow charts." Depending on the situation, they describe a series of additions, subtractions, and multiplications that could tell you where a given body would be.

Animal intelligence varies widely. Some have cognitive abilities that were once thought to be limited to humans, while others seem to act purely on instinct. It's not simply a matter of having large brains; birds don't have especially large ones, but they can master complicated problems or learn the solution from others in their social network.

So what can explain animal intelligence? One general trend that has been noted is that the size of the brain relative to the rest of the body seems to matter. Birds may not have big brains on an absolute scale, but their brains are relatively large compared to their body mass. Others have also noted that lots of the animals we consider smart seem to operate in social groups. These include birds, primates, elephants, and dolphins.

A new study looks at problem-solving across a wide range of carnivores and finds mixed support for these ideas. Belonging to a social group didn't seem to make a difference, but having a large brain to body ratio did. The surprising (or perhaps worrying) thing is that the brain to body ratio was high in some of the biggest carnivores tested: bears.

A group of mayors from communities in south Florida has released an open letter to one of their senators, Marco Rubio, in which they call for a meeting to discuss the challenges posed by climate change. The mayors, from communities like Key Biscayne, Miami, and West Palm Beach, say that the challenge of climate change requires a strong presidential commitment to action, one they argue Rubio is lacking.

"As mayors representing municipalities across Florida, we call on you to acknowledge the reality and urgency of climate change and to address the upcoming crisis it presents our communities," the letter reads. "Our cities and towns are already coping with the impacts of climate change today." Flooding at high tides, severe storm surges, and the intrusion of saltwater into municipal water supplies are all problems these cities face.

Those issues come thanks to 20cm of sea-level rise over the previous century. Studies project that the area could see up to another 30cm rise by 2050, which the mayors say "could wipe out as much as $4 billion in taxable real estate in the four-county region of Southeast Florida." If those projections are low, things get bad quickly; a 90cm rise takes out $31 billion and leaves cities and the Everglades decisively under water.

Renewable energy is generally limited by the weather. Wind, solar, and hydroelectric are all sensitive to the local conditions. Given that the US doesn't have a national electric grid, that means they're very intermittent; if the sun's not shining in California, then the golden state doesn't get much photovoltaic power.

Expanding the source of power over much larger regions can overcome the weather dependence; it's essentially unheard of for the entire US to be experiencing low-wind conditions. But this runs up against the structural limits of the US grid, where shifting power over large distances is either impossible or highly inefficient.

A new study released Monday looks into what would happen if that limitation were eliminated. It envisions a massive web of high-voltage, direct-current transmission lines, hooked up to 32 nodes spread across the US. This allows a massive spread of renewable power that could be dispatched anywhere in the nation. The result is a grid with dramatically lower carbon emissions and the bonus of lower costs to consumers.

The first state bills of the year that would interfere with science education have appeared in Oklahoma. There, both the House and Senate have seen bills that would prevent school officials and administrators from disciplining any teachers who introduce spurious information to science classes.

These bills have a long history, dating back to around the time when teaching intelligent design was determined to be an unconstitutional imposition of religion. A recent study showed that you could take the text of the bills and build an evolutionary tree that traces their modifications over the last decade. The latest two fit the patterns nicely.

The Senate version of the bill is by State Senator Josh Brecheen, a Republican. It is the fifth year in a row he's introduced a science education bill after announcing he wanted "every publically funded Oklahoma school to teach the debate of creation vs. evolution." This year's version omits any mention of specific areas of science that could be controversial. Instead, it simply prohibits any educational official from blocking a teacher who wanted to discuss the "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theories.

We recently published a bit of a rant about many Wikipedia science entries leaving a lot to be desired. In response, we were informed that an effort to improve that situation was already brewing. In fact, we're now happy to point out that the Wiki Education Foundation has declared 2016 the Wikipedia Year of Science.

The Wiki Education Foundation is a nonprofit that helps provide teachers and college-level instructors with the tools they need to get their students engaged in projects intended to improve Wikipedia. For example, the teachers could assign a class to improve entires in a specific topic area and use materials provided by the foundation to help the students edit entries and provide proper references.

This year, thanks to support from the Simons Foundation and Google, the Wiki Education Foundation is targeting entries in the sciences. The effort has already produced new materials for instructors to use, monthly themes (February's is zoology), and a general goal to improve biographical information for female scientists.

Lots of economic theory is based on the idea that humans will naturally seek to maximize their profits, but is that really the case? The field of behavioral economics involves a variety of attempts to find out. Things like game theory are used to create simplified economic systems in which people's behavior can be tracked.

A number of results indicate that some people do in fact behave as selfish, profit-maximizing individuals. But many others behave more altruistically, forging cooperative relationships in order to obtain greater benefits.

Or so it appeared. A group of Oxford researchers has now published a study in which they looked a bit more carefully at the people who were taking these tests, discovering that they'd be just as altruistic toward a computer. And that's probably because most of them simply don't understand the rules of the game they're playing.

The demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet didn't come about because of any discovery about Pluto itself. Rather, it was triggered by the discovery that Pluto was one of what's likely to be a large number of bodies that orbit well beyond Neptune. These Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs), some of which are larger than Pluto, tend to have unusual orbits, passing outside of the plane of the Solar System, with their ellipses stretched out on one side, while passing closer to the Sun on the other.

But in recent years, scientists have been noting some odd patterns in the orbits of KBOs. For many of them, their closest approach to the Sun comes as they cross the orbital plane of the inner planets. Now, the researcher who helped identify some of the first KBOs has published a paper in which he identifies a possible cause of these patterns: a distant, Neptune-sized body that would restore our Solar System's planetary total to nine.

Undiscovered planets have a long history, dating back to the prediction of Neptune's existence based on oddities in Uranus' orbit. That success, however, led to a couple of fruitless searches, one for an inner planet that could get Mercury's orbit to behave, and a second for something beyond Neptune. While the latter search turned up Pluto, it was too small to influence Neptune's orbit, which further observations indicated was just fine without any additional fixes.