Science/Technology

Rooftop solar power is booming. And as more and more consumers discover that prices for solar power are falling, they're slapping panels on their roofs and buying less energy from the power companies.

Are we really seeing a revolution in rooftop solar? “Yes,” says David Roberts, a staff writer at Vox.com.

“I think by any measure, the word revolution applies at this point,” Roberts says. “Just for perspective, the residential solar industry grew 76 percent in the last year in the US. ... It's exciting because I think we're right at the very, very beginning of it.”

The Baltimore orioles and yellow warblers are missing from the trees and bushes near the office of Emma Greig, a project leader for Project Feeder Watch at Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithica, New York.

“What I've noticed most in the past couple of weeks as I've walked into the office is actually a lack of [bird] songs,” Greig says. “It means that fall is here, or fall is on its way and winter is coming.”

Playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer wants to know the answers to the ethical and religious questions raised by new scientific and medical discoveries. 

“I like other marine animals, but octopuses — they’re aliens on our planet. They're the closest thing we're going to get to that.”

So says Richard Ross, a senior biologist at the Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences. “They have eight arms, they have suckers all over the place, they have great eyesight, they can make ink, they can swim, they have jet propulsion…The more we learn, the more interesting they become,” Ross says.

Now, Ross has discovered, in the larger Pacific striped octopus, some new and unexpected practices.

Orange. That was the new color of the Animas River in Colorado.

Contractors working for the EPA caused the blowout at the Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colorado. That released a plume of toxic orange-yellow sludge that eventually reached as far as Utah and New Mexico.

In many places in the world, rats are regarded as a vile nuisance and a menace to society. But the truth is that scientists, researchers and even police and health care workers are discovering how useful our ancient foe, the common brown rat, can actually be.

Aaron Blaisdell, a professor of comparative psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles, has found that rats are a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

If you're walking down the street reading this on your cell phone, we have bad news.

Science has now proven what you've long expected (if you haven't experienced it yourself): Walking while texting makes you slow down and weave like a drunk.

Conrad Earnest is a research scientist at Texas A&M University. He was inspired to study the health implications of walking while texting on a Saturday morning in Bath, England.

Parents of inquisitive kids: Listen up.

For years, scientists have known the basic ingredients behind a firefly's light. But a new study from the Journal of the American Chemical Society finally answers the question ‘Why do fireflies glow?’

Sarah Sander is a postdoctoral associate of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell University, and she spends many of her summer evenings out in the woods, hunting fireflies. 

Infectious bacteria have a way of outsmarting us. So maybe it's time, scientists say, that we stopped trying to kill them and instead pit them against each other in a sort of bacterial Hunger Games. 

“Bacteria, even though they are technically unicellular organisms, congregate and live in very tightly-packed communities, which we call biofilms,” explains Gürol Süel, an author on the study and an associate professor of molecular biology at the University of California, San Diego.

Scientists estimate that due to climate change, the village of Kivalina, in northwestern Alaska, will be underwater by the year 2025.

In 2008, the Inupiat village sued 24 of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies for damages. In 2013, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and the village has declared it will not file a new claim in state court.

Leave it to a group of new parents to be inspired to study the effects of screaming on the human brain.

David Poeppel, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University and director of the Max Planck Institute's Department of Neuroscience in Frankfurt, Germany, normally studies speech and communication. Recently, however, he found himself sharing a laboratory with a group of new parents in New York.