A Dutch appeals court on Tuesday overturned a landmark ruling that ordered energy company Shell to cut its carbon emissions by net 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels, while saying that "protection against dangerous climate change is a human right."

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In a written summary of Tuesday's ruling, the court said that Shell has a duty of care to limit its emissions, but it annulled the lower court's decision because it was "unable to establish that the social standard of care entails an obligation for Shell to reduce its CO2 emissions by 45%, or some other percentage.

"There is currently insufficient consensus in climate science on a specific reduction percentage to which an individual company like Shell should adhere."

When people have an audience watching them, it can change their performance for better or worse. Now, researchers reporting in iScience on November 8 have found that chimpanzees' performance on computer tasks is influenced by the number of people watching them.

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The researchers made the discovery after analyzing thousands of sessions in which chimpanzees completed a touch screen task over six years.

They found in three different number-based tasks that chimpanzees performed better on the most difficult task as the number of experimenters watching them increased. In contrast, they also found that, for the easiest task, chimpanzees performed worse when being watched by more experimenters or other familiar people.

A new species of rock skink has been discovered in central Australia by Monash University researchers.

Characterised by its orange, pointed snout, the Central Ranges rock skink, or Liopholis aputja, inhabits the hills of the Mann-Musgrave Ranges near the northern border of South Australia.

Jules Farquhar, who led the research for Monash University's School of Biological Sciences, said "aputja" is a local Aboriginal word meaning "of the hills".

Ukraine's border guards cannot trademark the anti-Russian wartime insult, "Russian warship, go f**k yourself," because it is a political slogan, an EU court ruled Wednesday.

The cry was the defiant response of Ukrainian defenders to a Russian warship calling for surrender in the early days of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The General Court of the European Union said the phrase "quickly became a symbol of Ukraine's fight against Russian aggression," and was widely used in a political context to promote support for Ukraine, a press release from the Court of Justice of the European Union outlined.

After we published our research, the story of driving rats went viral in the media. The project continues in my lab with new, improved rat-operated vehicles, or ROVs, designed by robotics professor John McManus and his students. These upgraded electrical ROVs – featuring rat-proof wiring, indestructible tires and ergonomic driving levers – are akin to a rodent version of Tesla's Cybertruck.

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While we can't directly ask rats whether they like to drive, we devised a behavioral test to assess their motivation to drive. This time, instead of only giving rats the option of driving to the Froot Loop Tree, they could also make a shorter journey on foot – or paw, in this case.

Surprisingly, two of the three rats chose to take the less efficient path of turning away from the reward and running to the car to drive to their Froot Loop destination. This response suggests that the rats enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination.

Astronomers have spotted pure chaos lurking in the cosmos. Thousands of light years away from Earth, a small yet intensely heavy star is releasing bursts of material as powerful as repeating atomic bombs while spinning wildly on its own axis.

Using NASA's NICER (Neutron Star Interior Composition ExploreR) telescope, a team of astronomers discovered the strange object, and it's now one of the fastest spinning objects ever observed. This neutron star, the collapsed core of a massive star, completes 716 rotations per second while pulling material from its companion star and releasing it in the form of thermonuclear bursts. The discovery is detailed in a paper recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Just under seven years of data from 83,013 adults were collected as part of the UK Biobank, using wrist-worn devices to track their activity, sleep, and sedentary time. The amount of time individuals spent standing and sitting was matched with incidences of cardiovascular diseases – coronary heart disease, heart failure and stroke – as well as circulatory diseases – low blood pressure on standing, varicose veins, chronic venous insufficiency, and venous ulcers.

The researchers found no association between time spent standing and the risk of cardiovascular disease, suggesting standing desks and similar work postures might not be enough to stave off the health problems associated with sitting around.

University of Sydney population health scientist Matthew Ahmadi suggests this might be because many studies in support of standing were based on 'soft endpoints' like improved blood pressure, insulin sensitivity, and triglyceride levels.

When a volcanic eruption buried the Roman city of Pompeii nearly 2,000 years ago, a thick layer of volcanic ash encased the bodies, preserving their forms.

The bodies, later immortalized by plaster casts, inspired narratives about who the victims were: for example, a mother holding her child, and two sisters embracing in their final moments.

New DNA evidence has upended some of those assumptions about the identities, lives and relationships of the ancient people. A group of four long-dead Pompeiians, for instance — once thought to be parents and their children — turned out to have no biological relation to one another.

Many black holes detected to date appear to be part of a pair. These binary systems comprise a black hole and a secondary object — such as a star, a much denser neutron star, or another black hole — that spiral around each other, drawn together by the black hole's gravity to form a tight orbital pair.

Now a surprising discovery is expanding the picture of black holes, the objects they can host, and the way they form.

In a study appearing today in Nature, physicists at MIT and Caltech report that they have observed a "black hole triple" for the first time. The new system holds a central black hole in the act of consuming a small star that's spiraling in very close to the black hole, every 6.5 days — a configuration similar to most binary systems. But surprisingly, a second star appears to also be circling the black hole, though at a much greater distance. The physicists estimate this far-off companion is orbiting the black hole every 70,000 years.

Australian scientists have solved a mystery which has gripped Sydney: what were the sticky dark blobs which washed up on some of the city's famed beaches last month?

Initially believed to be tar balls, they were in fact a "disgusting" combination of human faeces, cooking oil, chemicals and illicit drugs, researchers say.

PFAS are in Miami's rainwater. And it is the latest evidence the synthetic "forever chemicals" — that have raised health concerns for people and wildlife — hitch a ride on the water cycle, using the complex system to circulate over greater distances.

For more than a year, FIU researchers collected and analyzed 42 rainwater samples across three different sites in Miami-Dade County. A total of 21 perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, were detected, including PFOS and PFOA (since phased out of production over cancer concerns), as well as the newer varieties used in manufacturing today.

While profiles of several PFAS matched back to local sources, others did not. According to the study, published in Atmospheric Pollution Research, this suggests Earth's atmosphere acts as a pathway to transport these chemicals far and wide — contributing to the worldwide pollution problem.

"PFAS are practically everywhere," said FIU Assistant Professor of Chemistry and study author Natalia Soares Quinete. "Now we're able to show the role air masses play in potentially bringing these pollutants to other places where they can impact surface water and groundwater."

Quincy Jones, the multitalented music titan whose vast legacy ranged from producing Michael Jackson's historic "Thriller" album to writing prize-winning film and television scores and collaborating with Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and hundreds of other recording artists, has died at 91. Jones' publicist, Arnold Robinson, says he died Sunday night at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles, surrounded by his family. Jones was to have received an honorary Academy Award later this month.

Oxygen, the molecule that supports intelligent life as we know it, is largely made by plants. Whether underwater or on land, they do this by photosynthesising carbon dioxide. However, a recent study demonstrates that oxygen may be produced without the need for life at depths where light cannot reach.

The authors of a recent publication in Nature Geoscience were collecting samples from deep ocean sediments to determine the rate of oxygen consumption at the seafloor through things like organisms or sediments that can react with oxygen. But in several of their experiments, they actually found oxygen was increasing as opposed to decreasing as they would have expected. This left them questioning how this oxygen was being produced.

They found that this "dark" oxygen production at the seafloor seems to only happen in the presence of mineral concentrates called polymetallic nodules and deposits of metals called metalliferous sediments. The authors think the nodules have the right mixture of metals and are densely packed enough for an electrical current to pass through for electrolysis, creating enough energy to separate the hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O) from water (H₂O).

Before this week, most of the McDonald's ice cream makers could only be fixed through the machine's manufacturer. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects the code embedded in the ice cream machines, made it illegal for third parties, like McDonald's employees and franchisee owners, to break the digital locks installed by manufacturers.

The new rule, which went into effect on Monday, allows outside vendors to fix "retail-level commercial food preparation equipment." That includes McDonald's ice cream machines, as 404 media journalist Jason Koebler explained to NPR's Weekend Edition.

It's a win for the "right to repair" movement, which pushes back against companies incentivized to control the repairs made to their own products. The movement advocates for legislation that gets manufacturers to provide consumers and independent repair services access to their parts, tools and service information so consumers can get their own, legally bought devices fixed. The movement prevailed when Apple in 2021 announced it would allow customers to repair their iPhones themselves.

A team of astronomers at the University of Arizona, Tucson used NASA's Hubble and James Webb space telescopes for an unprecedented in-depth look at the nearly 100-billion-mile-diameter debris disk encircling Vega. "Between the Hubble and Webb telescopes, you get this very clear view of Vega. It's a mysterious system because it's unlike other circumstellar disks we've looked at," said Andras Gáspár of the University of Arizona, a member of the research team. "The Vega disk is smooth, ridiculously smooth."

The big surprise to the research team is that there is no obvious evidence for one or more large planets plowing through the face-on disk like snow tractors. "It's making us rethink the range and variety among exoplanet systems," said Kate Su of the University of Arizona, lead author of the paper presenting the Webb findings.

There are more than 114,000 missing persons in Mexico, and that number is continuing to rise. Criminal violence in the country is at a record level, largely driven by gangs and drug cartels. Many of those missing are buried in clandestine graves all across the country.

To contribute to the solution of this complex problem, a group of scientists from the Center for Research in Geospatial Information Sciences (CentroGeo) put technology and data analysis at the service of the searches.

"I never thought I would have to work on this, but if this knowledge is of any use, now is the time to show it," says José Luis Silván, a geographer at CentroGeo. Years ago, as part of his doctoral work, he specialized in measuring forest biomass and human populations through satellite information. At that time, he was far from imagining the scientific work he is doing today: investigating the potential of drones, hyperspectral images, and protocols to detect clandestine graves.