The American pika, a small animal with a big personality that has long delighted hikers and backpackers, is disappearing from low-elevation sites in California mountains, and the cause appears to be climate change, according to a new study.

Researchers surveyed 67 locations with historical records of pikas and found that the animals have disappeared from ten of them (15 percent of the sites surveyed). Pika populations were most likely to go locally extinct at sites with high summer temperatures and low habitat area, said Joseph Stewart, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and first author of a paper reporting the new findings, published January 29 in the Journal of Biogeography.

Last month, we got treated to three of Jupiter's moons - Europa, Callisto and Io - parading across the giant gas planet's banded face.

There are four Galilean satellites - named after the 17th century astronomer Galileo Galilei who discovered them among the  first observations ever made with a telescope. They complete orbits around Jupiter ranging from two to seventeen days in duration and can commonly be seen transiting the face of Jupiter and casting shadows onto its layers of cloud. Seeing three of them transiting the face of Jupiter at the same time is less common, occurring only once or twice a decade in most cases. It last happened in 2013.

If you own a home, termites are the enemy, but if you want to hold back a desert, their large dirt mounds can be crucial to protecting semi-arid ecosystems and agricultural lands.

That's obviously important for feeding people and insert obligatory global warming reference here, because it means those areas could be a lot more resilient to changing climates than climate scientists believe.

The American century was the result of a can-do attitude born in the 19th century. As prosperity began to increase, collectives, such as unions, became the norm, and they were endorsed by many educated elites - but they were still promoting individualism in doing so.

That individualism rose as we shifted from blue-collar union jobs to the white-collar kind. Though American conservatives claim to care about small business and American liberals claim to care about unions, the white-collar service jobs that have replaced both have caused the individualism Americans are known for today - including distrust of centralized government, subjective definitions of words and invented baby names, and even family structure.

SALT LAKE CITY, Feb. 5, 2015 - The conservation value of growing coffee under trees instead of on open farms is well known, but hasn't been studied much in Africa. So a University of Utah-led research team studied birds in the Ethiopian home of Arabica coffee and found that "shade coffee" farms are good for birds, but some species do best in forest.

"Ethiopian shade coffee may be the most bird friendly coffee in the world, but a primary forest is irreplaceable for bird conservation, especially for birds of the forest understory," says doctoral student Evan Buechley, lead author of a new study that will be published online Feb. 11 in the journal Biological Conservation.

For decades, researchers in artificial intelligence, or AI, worked on specialized problems, developing theoretical concepts and workable algorithms for various aspects of the field. Computer vision, planning and reasoning experts all struggled independently in areas that many thought would be easy to solve, but which proved incredibly difficult.

However, in recent years, as the individual aspects of artificial intelligence matured, researchers began bringing the pieces together, leading to amazing displays of high-level intelligence: from IBM's Watson to the recent poker playing champion to the ability of AI to recognize cats on the internet.

Unlike slow and steady batteries, supercapacitors gulp up energy rapidly and deliver it in fast, powerful jolts. A growing array of consumer products is benefiting from these energy-storage devices, reports Chemical & Engineering News, with cars and trucks -- and their drivers -- poised to be major beneficiaries.

For some children, despite having no known physical or mental disability, learning to read, write, spell, do maths, dress, throw and catch a ball, or organize themselves presents significant challenges. When childhood milestones involving speech and movement are slow to develop in young children, should parents be concerned that their child might have a learning disability?

Learning disabilities may make life more of a challenge, but a diagnosis is not a life sentence. Shutterstock

Below we outline three learning disabilities and what to look out for.

By: Marsha Lewis, Inside Science

(Inside Science TV) – They may look flimsy, but the materials printed with 3-D printing technology are one-of-a-kind, light-weight and super-strong.

Materials engineers at LLNL have created a material with a special 3-D printer that mixes hard metal, tough ceramics and flexible plastics.

“It can hold more than 100,000-times its own weight. In fact, even more than that," said Chris Spadaccini, a materials engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

“One of the benefits of this methodology is the ability to work with a wide range of materials," said Josh Kuntz, a materials engineer at LLNL.

In the last 40 years, health care has improved a great deal and we are living longer than ever. But the downside to longevity is more time for mutations to occur, and that means cancer.

A new forecast in the British Journal of Cancer has an alarming finding - that half of people in the United Kingdom will get cancer - but it makes sense. The good news is that in the last 40 years, cancer survival has doubled and half of cancer survivors now live more than 10 years.