Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany's renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world.

"Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset," thanks to the Energiewende, wrote a New York Times reporter in 2014.

With Germany as inspiration, the United Nations and World Bank poured billions into renewables like wind, solar, and hydro in developing nations like Kenya.

But then, last year, Germany was forced to acknowledge that it had to delay its phase-out of coal, and would not meet its 2020 greenhouse gas reduction commitments. It announced plans to bulldoze an ancient church and forest in order to get at the coal underneath it.

After renewables investors and advocates, including Al Gore and Greenpeace, criticized Germany, journalists came to the country's defense. "Germany has fallen short of its emission targets in part because its targets were so ambitious," one of them argued last summer. "If the rest of the world made just half Germany's effort, the future for our planet would look less bleak," she wrote. "So Germany, don't give up. And also: Thank you."

But Germany didn't just fall short of its climate targets. Its emissions have flat-lined since 2009.

Approximately every two Earth years, when it is summer on the southern hemisphere of Mars, a window opens: Only in this season can water vapor efficiently rise from the lower into the upper Martian atmosphere. There, winds carry the rare gas to the north pole. While part of the water vapor decays and escapes into space, the rest sinks back down near the poles. Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany describe this unusual Martian water cycle in a current issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. Their computer simulations show how water vapor overcomes the barrier of cold air in the middle atmosphere of Mars and reaches higher atmospheric layers. This could explain why Mars, unlike Earth, has lost most of its water.

Researchers have identified a group of ancient bald cypress trees which are over 2,000 years old in the forested wetlands of North Carolina's Black River.

Staggeringly, the scientists found that one of the trees was 2,624 years old. This makes the bald cypress the oldest-known tree in the eastern portion of North America, as well as the longest-living known wetland tree species on Earth, according to a study published in the journal Environmental Research Communications.

The trees were discovered in 2017 by lead author of the study David Stahle from the University of Arkansas and his colleagues, who took 110 core samples to determine their age with radiocarbon dating.

Stahle's prior research in the area had already identified bald cypress trees (Taxodium distichum) which were up to 1,700 years old, but the new data, taken from trees which had not been studied before, suggests they are longer-lived than previously thought.

Man's future missions to Mars may see humans housed in incredible 3D-printed pod-like structures, according to a futuristic design project that scooped a $500,000 NASA prize.

Proposed by New York-based company AI SpaceFactory, the strange structure is designed to be printed from recycled substances and materials found on-site during deep space explorations to the moon, Mars or beyond, to build sustainable housing for adventuring humans.

Darwinian evolution is a brilliant and beautiful scientific theory. Once it was a daring guess. Today it is basic to the credo that defines the modern worldview. Accepting the theory as settled truth -no more subject to debate than the earth being round or the sky blue or force being mass times acceleration- certifies that you are devoutly orthodox in your scientific views; which in turn is an essential first step towards being taken seriously in any part of modern intellectual life. But what if Darwin was wrong?

Like so many others, I grew up with Darwin's theory, and had always believed it was true. I had heard doubts over the years from well-informed, sometimes brilliant people, but I had my hands full cultivating my garden, and it was easier to let biology take care of itself. But in recent years, reading and discussion have shut that road down for good.

This is sad. It is no victory of any sort for religion. It is a defeat for human ingenuity. It means one less beautiful idea in our world, and one more hugely difficult and important problem back on mankind's to-do list. But we each need to make our peace with the facts, and not try to make life on earth simpler than it really is.

Charles Darwin explained monumental change by making one basic assumption-all life-forms descend from a common ancestor-and adding two simple processes anyone can understand: random, heritable variation and natural selection. Out of these simple ingredients, conceived to be operating blindly over hundreds of millions of years, he conjured up change that seems like the deliberate unfolding of a grand plan, designed and carried out with superhuman genius. Could nature really have pulled out of its hat the invention of life, of increasingly sophisticated life-forms and, ultimately, the unique-in-the-cosmos (so far as we know) human mind-given no strategy but trial and error? The mindless accumulation of small changes? It is an astounding idea. Yet Darwin's brilliant and lovely theory explains how it could have happened.

A popular GPS tracker - used as a panic alarm for elderly patients, to monitor kids and track vehicles - contains security flaws, which security researchers say are so severe the device should be recalled.

The Chinese-manufactured white-label location tracker, rebranded and sold by more than a dozen companies - including OwnFone Footprint and SureSafeGo - uses a SIM card to connect to the 2G/GPRS cell network. Although none of the devices have internet connectivity and won't be found on exposed device database sites like Shodan, they still can be remotely accessed and controlled by SMS.

Researchers at U.K. cybersecurity firm Fidus Information Security say the device can be tricked into turning over its real-time location simply by anyone sending it a text message with a keyword. Through another command, anyone can call the device and remotely listen in to its in-built microphone without alerting anyone.

Another command can remotely kill the cell signal altogether, rendering the device effectively useless.

Editor's note: The online journal Sapientia recently posed a good question to several participants in a forum: "Is Intelligent Design Detectable by Science?" This is one key issue on which proponents of ID and of theistic evolution differ. Stephen Meyer, philosopher of science and director of Discovery Institute^'s Center for Science & Culture, gave the following reply.

Biologists have long recognized that many organized structures in living organisms - the elegant form and protective covering of the coiled nautilus; the interdependent parts of the vertebrate eye; the interlocking bones, muscles, and feathers of a bird wing - "give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."¹

Before Darwin, biologists attributed the beauty, integrated complexity, and adaptation of organisms to their environments to a powerful designing intelligence. Consequently, they also thought the study of life rendered the activity of a designing intelligence detectable in the natural world.

Yet Darwin argued that this appearance of design could be more simply explained as the product of a purely undirected mechanism, namely, natural selection and random variation. Modern neo-Darwinists have similarly asserted that the undirected process of natural selection and random mutation produced the intricate designed-like structures in living systems. They affirm that natural selection can mimic the powers of a designing intelligence without itself being guided by an intelligent agent. Thus, living organisms may look designed, but on this view, that appearance is illusory and, consequently, the study of life does not render the activity of a designing intelligence detectable in the natural world. As Darwin himself insisted, "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course in which the wind blows."² Or as the eminent evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has argued, Darwin accounted for "design without a designer" and showed "that the directive organization of living beings can be explained as the result of a natural process, natural selection, without any need to resort to a Creator or other external agent."³

The shale industry faces an uncertain future as drillers try to outrun the treadmill of precipitous well declines.

For years, companies have deployed an array of drilling techniques to extract more oil and gas out of their wells, steadily intensifying each stage of the operation. Longer laterals, more water, more frac sand, closer spacing of wells - pushing each of these to their limits, for the most part, led to more production. Higher output allowed the industry to outpace the infamous decline rates from shale wells.

In fact, since 2012, average lateral lengths have increased 44 percent to over 7,000 feet and the volume of water used in drilling has surged more than 250 percent, according to a new report for the Post Carbon Institute. Taken together, longer laterals and more prodigious use of water and sand means that a well drilled in 2018 can reach 2.6 times as much reservoir rock as a well drilled in 2012, the report says.

That sounds impressive, but the industry may simply be frontloading production. The suite of drilling techniques "have lowered costs and allowed the resource to be extracted with fewer wells, but have not significantly increased the ultimate recoverable resource," J. David Hughes, an earth scientist, and author of the Post Carbon report, warned. Technological improvements "don't change the fundamental characteristics of shale production, they only speed up the boom-to-bust life cycle," he said.

One of the biggest investment opportunities over the next decade will be in companies working to delay human death, a market expected to be worth at least $600 billion by 2025, according to one of Wall Street's major investment banks.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts Felix Tran and Haim Israel believe that genome sequencers such as Illumina, high-tech players such as Alphabet and biotech companies such as Novartis are on the cusp of "bringing unprecedented increases to the quality and length of human lifespans."

Innovation in genome science, big data and "ammortality," which includes wearable technology and products in the so-called wellness space, could soon prolong healthy human life well beyond 100 years, BofA told clients Wednesday.

Most Europeans descend from a combination of European hunter-gatherers, Anatolian early farmers, and Steppe herders. But only European speakers of Uralic languages like Estonian and Finnish also have DNA from ancient Siberians. Now, with the help of ancient DNA samples, researchers reporting in Current Biology on May 9 suggest that these languages may have arrived from Siberia by the beginning of the Iron Age, about 2,500 years ago, rather than evolving in Northern Europe.

The findings highlight the way in which a combination of genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data can converge to tell the same story about what happened in particular areas in the distant past.

"Since the transition from Bronze to Iron Age coincides with the diversification and arrival time of Finnic languages in the Eastern Baltic proposed by linguists, it is plausible that the people who brought Siberian ancestry to the region also brought Uralic languages with them," says Lehti Saag of University of Tartu, Estonia.