Greens dream of a zero-emissions world without coal, oil and natural gas. They need to think what they wish for.

First there would be no mass production of steel without coke from coking coal to remove oxygen from iron ore. People could cut trees in forests for charcoal to produce pig iron and crude steels, but forests would soon be exhausted. Coal saved the forests from this fate.

We could produce gold and silver without using mineral hydro-carbons and with ingenuity we could probably produce unrefined copper, lead and tin and alloys like brass and bronze. But making large quantities of nuclear fuels, cement, aluminium, refined metals, plastics, nylons, synthetics, petro-chemicals and poly pipes would be impossible.

Regulators need to pay more attention to controlling CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing tool, says Jennifer Doudna.

One year on: Doudna, a University of California biochemist who helped invent CRISPR technology in 2012, wrote an editorial in Science yesterday titled "CRISPR's unwanted anniversary."

The anniversary is that of the announcement by a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, that he had created gene-edited twin girls. That was a medical felony as far as Doudna is concerned, an unnecessary experiment that violated the doctor's rule to avoid causing harm and ignored calls not to proceed.

Light pollution is a significant but overlooked driver of the rapid decline of insect populations, according to the most comprehensive review of the scientific evidence to date.

Artificial light at night can affect every aspect of insects' lives, the researchers said, from luring moths to their deaths around bulbs, to spotlighting insect prey for rats and toads, to obscuring the mating signals of fireflies.

"We strongly believe artificial light at night - in combination with habitat loss, chemical pollution, invasive species, and climate change - is driving insect declines," the scientists concluded after assessing more than 150 studies. "We posit here that artificial light at night is another important - but often overlooked - bringer of the insect apocalypse."

However, unlike other drivers of decline, light pollution was relatively easy to prevent, the team said, by switching off unnecessary lights and using proper shades. "Doing so could greatly reduce insect losses immediately," they said.

Brett Seymoure, a behavioural ecologist at Washington University in St Louis and senior author of the review, said: "Artificial light at night is human-caused lighting - ranging from streetlights to gas flares from oil extraction. It can affect insects in pretty much every imaginable part of their lives."

A military-purpose satellite launched from Russia's Plesetsk space center has reached orbit after a successful launch, carrying a mysterious top-secret optical surveillance and "inspection" device.

Launched on a modified Soyuz carrier rocket, the classified military satellite took flight late on Monday and reached orbit soon after, where it will help monitor other Russian craft high above the planet, the Defense Ministry said in a brief statement.

"The spacecraft created on the basis of a unified multifunctional space platform has been put into the target orbit, from where the state of domestic satellites can be monitored."

It has been six months, since I informed the public about the dangers of police Knightscope robots that look an awful lot like Doctor Who's infamous Dalek's.

In my article I warned people that police would use Knightscope's thermal imaging cameras to identify what is under everyone's clothes. (To learn more about public imaging scanners click here.)

A recent article in One Zero revealed that Knightscope has turned their Robocop's into mobile facial recognition devices that can also blacklist people.

"One presentation slide features the company's facial recognition capabilities, indicating that the company can surface a known person's name, the similarity of the person's face compared to a known image, and a log of other identities that the robot has seen."

It is bad enough that the Feds and police use secret blacklists but it is an entirely different story when private companies like Knightscope use facial recognition to do the same thing.

What we are seeing is a total transformation of our legal system run by corporate interests.

By the second trimester, long before a baby's eyes can see images, they can detect light.

But the light-sensitive cells in the developing retina — the thin sheet of brain-like tissue at the back of the eye — were thought to be simple on-off switches, presumably there to set up the 24-hour, day-night rhythms parents hope their baby will follow.

University of California, Berkeley, scientists have now found evidence that these simple cells actually talk to one another as part of an interconnected network that gives the retina more light sensitivity than once thought, and that may enhance the influence of light on behavior and brain development in unsuspected ways.

In the developing eye, perhaps 3% of ganglion cells — the cells in the retina that send messages through the optic nerve into the brain — are sensitive to light and, to date, researchers have found about six different subtypes that communicate with various places in the brain. Some talk to the suprachiasmatic nucleus to tune our internal clock to the day-night cycle. Others send signals to the area that makes our pupils constrict in bright light.

But others connect with surprising areas: the perihabenula, which regulates mood, and the amygdala, which deals with emotions.

In mice and monkeys, recent evidence suggests that these ganglion cells also talk with one another through electrical connections called gap junctions, implying much more complexity in immature rodent and primate eyes than imagined.

"Given the variety of these ganglion cells and that they project to many different parts of the brain, it makes me wonder whether they play a role in how the retina connects up to the brain," said Marla Feller, a UC Berkeley professor of molecular and cell biology and senior author of a paper that appeared this month in the journal Current Biology. "Maybe not for visual circuits, but for non-vision behaviors. Not only the pupillary light reflex and circadian rhythms, but possibly explaining problems like light-induced migraines, or why light therapy works for depression."

Even though the creature's remains were well-preserved due to freezing temperatures, scientists are yet to determine what kind of canine it actually was.

The remains of an ancient puppy found buried in permafrost in the vicinity of the Indigirka River in Siberia, north-east of Yakutsk, left researchers scratching their heads as even a DNA test didn't help them determine the exact nature of the creature, The Siberian Times reports.

According to the media outlet, the puppy was originally discovered in 2018, with all of its body intact, including whiskers and eyelashes.

But while scientists were able to establish that the creature lived about 18,000 years ago and that it was about two-months old at the time of its death, the initial genome sequencing performed by Swedish Centre for Palaeogenetics (CPG) failed to define whether the creature was a wolf or a dog.

Humans can't fly, but we're determined to work out how others do.

Last month a Canadian team suggested that the way birds move their wings, rather than the shape of those wings, determines how they fly.

Now researchers from Stanford University, US, have watched five parrotlets in flight and discovered that - counterintuitive as it might sound - they used drag to help with their take-off and lift to assist with landing.

Conventional wisdom tells us that drag is a force that slows an object down and lift is a force that counters gravity. However, in this case drag supported up to half of the birds' (admittedly low) body weight at a crucial time, while lift helped with braking.

David Lentink and Diana Chin made the finding after encouraging Gaga, Gary, Oreo, Aurora and Boy to make repeated flights from perch to perch through an instrumented flight chamber developed specifically for the purpose.

It was only 80 centimetres long, but then the birds only weigh 30 grams - and a grain of millet was sufficient inducement for each trip.

To measure the horizontal and vertical forces instantaneously, Chin built a setup with sensor panels on the floor, ceiling, front and back of the birds' flight paths.

For most people, continents are Earth's seven main large landmasses.

But geoscientists have a different take on this. They look at the type of rock a feature is made of, rather than how much of its surface is above sea level.

In the past few years, we've seen an increase in the discovery of lost continents. Most of these have been plateaus or mountains made of continental crust hidden from our view, below sea level.

One example is Zealandia, the world's eighth continent that extends underwater from New Zealand.

Several smaller lost continents, called microcontinents, have also recently been discovered submerged in the eastern and western Indian Ocean.

Seventy years ago, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov imagined a world where robots would serve humans in countless ways, and he equipped them with built-in safeguards - now known as Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, to prevent them, among other goals, from ever harming a person.

Guaranteeing safe and fair machine behavior is still an issue today, says machine learning researcher and lead author Philip Thomas at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "When someone applies a machine learning algorithm, it's hard to control its behavior," he points out. This risks undesirable outcomes from algorithms that direct everything from self-driving vehicles to insulin pumps to criminal sentencing, say he and co-authors.