Differences among children in educational achievement are highly heritable from the early school years until the end of compulsory education at age 16, when UK students are assessed nationwide with standard achievement tests [General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE)]. Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence.

We find that many of the Earth's climate variables, including surface temperature, outgoing longwave radiation, cooling rates, and frozen surface extent, are sensitive to far-IR surface emissivity, a largely unconstrained, temporally and spatially heterogeneous scaling factor for the blackbody radiation from the surface at wavelengths between 15 μm and 100 μm. We also describe a previously unidentified mechanism that amplifies high-latitude and high-altitude warming in finding significantly lower values of far-IR emissivity for ocean and desert surfaces than for sea ice and snow.

To aid in prioritizing the development of tuberculosis (TB) vaccines most likely to reach the 2050 TB elimination goal, we estimated the impact and cost-effectiveness of a range of vaccine profiles in low- and middle-income countries. Using mathematical modeling, we show that vaccines targeted at adolescents/adults could have a much greater impact on the TB burden over a 2024–2050 time horizon than those vaccines targeted at infants. Such vaccines could also be cost-effective, even with relatively high vaccine prices.

Life-cycle assessments commonly used to analyze the environmental costs and benefits of climate-mitigation options are usually static in nature and address individual power plants. Our paper presents, to our knowledge, the first life-cycle assessment of the large-scale implementation of climate-mitigation technologies, addressing the feedback of the electricity system onto itself and using scenario-consistent assumptions of technical improvements in key energy and material production technologies.

Hydrocarbon production from unconventional sources is growing rapidly, accompanied by concerns about drinking-water contamination and other environmental risks. Using noble gas and hydrocarbon tracers, we distinguish natural sources of methane from anthropogenic contamination and evaluate the mechanisms that cause elevated hydrocarbon concentrations in drinking water near natural-gas wells. We document fugitive gases in eight clusters of domestic water wells overlying the Marcellus and Barnett Shales, including declining water quality through time over the Barnett.

Agriculture is a key driver of tropical deforestation, and there is heated debate about whether productivity-enhancing crop innovations can slow such environmental degradation. For fixed food demand, globally higher yields will reduce cropland and hence deforestation. However, regional innovations often boost agricultural profitability and lower prices, thereby leading to cropland expansion in the innovating region. This paper develops a framework for understanding the impact of regional innovations on global land use and the environment.

Recent advances in information technologies have increased our participation in “sharing economies,” where applications that allow networked, real-time data exchange facilitate the sharing of living spaces, equipment, or vehicles with others. However, the impact of large-scale sharing on sustainability is not clear, and a framework to assess its benefits quantitatively is missing. For this purpose, we propose the method of shareability networks, which translates spatio-temporal sharing problems into a graph-theoretic framework that provides efficient solutions.

Illegal harvest for commercial trade has recently surged to become a major threat to some of the world’s most endangered and charismatic species. Unfortunately, the cryptic nature of illegal killing makes estimation of rates and impacts difficult. Applying a model based on field census of carcasses, to our knowledge we provide the first detailed assessment of African elephant illegal killing rates at population, regional, and continental scales.

Hexaploid bread wheat is generally more salt tolerant than its tetraploid progenitor. However, the physiological bases and the relative contributions of immediate effects of polyploidization and subsequently acquired adaptive changes in the salt tolerance of hexaploid wheat remained elusive. This study compared a large suite of morphophysiological traits in synthetic and natural hexaploid wheats, and their tetraploid and diploid progenitors, under normal and salt-stressed conditions, and studied subgenome-specific expression of a critical salt-tolerance gene, HKT1;5.

Phytoplankton is at the base of the marine food web. Its carbon fixation, the net primary productivity (NPP), sustains most living marine resources. In regions like the tropical Pacific (30°N–30°S), natural fluctuations of NPP have large impacts on marine ecosystems including fisheries. The capacity to predict these natural variations would provide an important asset to science-based management approaches but remains unexplored yet.