July 31, 2012  |   This artist's concept features NASA's Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot designed to Mars' past or present ability to sustain microbial life. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech. NASA scientists call it the seven minutes of terror: the amount of...

July 25, 2012  |   In a four-day period this July, the Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate than satellite data has ever recorded and at higher elevations than we've seen in our lifetimes. So what caused this extraordinary melt? Since May,...

July 24, 2012  |   In 1987, Sally Ride retired from NASA to take a job a Stanford University, leaving America's space program "without a real hero" and "struggling to stay in orbit." That's according to a historic MacNeil/Lehrer report that...

July 23, 2012  |   Sally Ride monitors control panels from the pilot's chair on the flight deck of the Challenger shuttle on June 25, 1983. Floating in front of her is a flight procedures notebook. Photo by Apic/Getty Images. Sally Ride, the first...

July 20, 2012  |   A gas mask was marked as the first piece of evidence in a criminal investigation. Federal authorities searched through evidence in the parking lot behind the Century 16 movie theater where a gunman shot and killed 12 people Friday...

July 13, 2012  |   Last week, a powerful "derecho" storm hammered the mid-Atlantic region, snuffing out power during the peak of a sweltering heat wave for nearly a week in some homes. Days later, our science correspondent Miles O'Brien traveled...

July 12, 2012  |   University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins holds three ancient tools known as Western Stemmed projectiles from the Paisley Caves in Oregon. Photo by Jim Barlow. It was long thought that the Clovis people were the first North American human...

July 4, 2012  |   Updated: 11:40 a.m. ET | Here's a look at Wednesday's exciting announcement from CERN. Plus, we've included a sampling of visual primers from various media outlets to help explain the Higgs boson, what it is, why it's been so...

June 28, 2012  |   In 1947, when film star Alan Alda was 11-years-old, he asked a teacher the seemingly innocuous question, "What is a flame?" The answer, "oxidation," was thoroughly unsatisfying to young Alda. Fast forward to 2012. Out of...

June 21, 2012  |   Consider these facts from Carl Zimmer's book, "A Planet of Viruses": If you put all the viruses in the ocean on a scale, they would equal the weight of 75 million blue whales. And if you...

June 15, 2012  |   As many as 2 billion monarch butterflies migrate every year to winter in Mexico. Scientists from the University of Georgia capture and collect these butterflies and, by rigging them to a flying treadmill, study the influence of a common...

June 13, 2012  |   Update: 12:58 p.m. ET| The NuSTAR telescope soared into orbit atop a Pegasus XL rocket on Wednesday. You can see the launch here: What heats the sun's outer atmosphere? What makes stars explode? How do black holes influence the growth...

June 6, 2012  |   For those Earthlings lucky enough to be under cloudless skies during the Venus transit on Tuesday, the planet took the form of a tiny dot gliding across the Sun's Northern hemisphere. Editor's note: it was a bust at NewsHour...

June 6, 2012  |   In the late 1940s, Sir Andrew Huxley and Sir Alan Hodgkin teased a nerve cell from an Atlantic squid, placed it into a seawater bath and zapped it with currents. Then, with the data, they built a mathematical model that...

May 17, 2012  |   On Saturday, if all goes as planned, the privately owned spaceflight company SpaceX will launch its Dragon capsule into low-Earth orbit and three days later dock with the International Space Station. It would be the first...

May 16, 2012  |   On April 12, 2011, a 59-year-old woman with a sensor implanted in her brain picked up her cinnamon latte with a robotic arm, brought it to her lips and took a sip through a straw using only her thoughts. It...

May 14, 2012  |   Nature is a great architect, and the vascular network - or veins - of a leaf are key to its structure. Mathematical physicists at Rockefeller University use fluorescent dye and time lapse photography to digitally study microscopic patterns within...

May 10, 2012  |   Editor's note: On Thursday's NewsHour broadcast, science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on the debate over using chimpanzees for biomedical research. First, here's an inside look at one of the sanctuaries profiled in the piece. At Chimp...

April 26, 2012  |   Is it inherent gender differences, subtle discrimination, the overwhelming "maleness" of the hard science fields? Experts have struggled for years to understand what's keeping more women from entering physics, engineering and computer science. Judy Woodruff recently...

April 25, 2012  |   A female lab technician pipettes liquid into test tubes. Photo by Apostrophe Productions. Shree Bose, who won the grand prize at this year's Google Global Science Fair, credits her love of science to her big brother, Pinaki. As a...

April 17, 2012  |   Discovery circles above Washington, D.C., before landing at Dulles International Airport. Photo by Getty Images. In Washington D.C., people pressed their faces against windows, squinted from rooftops and crowded the National Mall to catch a glimpse of Space Shuttle...

March 28, 2012  |   What can fossilized raindrop impressions preserved in 2.7-billion-year-old volcanic ash tell us about the ancient Earth's atmosphere? Can they help resolve a great astrophysical puzzle? A study released online Wednesday in the journal Nature suggests they can at least bring...

March 26, 2012  |   Cameron's Historic Dive Cut Short by Leak; Few Signs of Life Seen A hydraulic fuel leak cut filmmaker James Cameron's dive to the deepest part of the ocean short, but he still plunged to nearly seven miles underwater. And as...

March 22, 2012  |   As global temperatures increase and weather patterns shift, the PBS NewsHour will explore how American communities are dealing with climate change. On our new Coping with Climate Change page, you'll be able to find video reports, blog posts, slide...

March 1, 2012  |   Coral eggs are rich in waxy fat, which provides energy during development, and buoyancy, helping them float to the ocean surface during spawning. Photo by Heyward & Negri, AIMS Once a year, shortly after a full moon, many corals...

February 23, 2012  |   Last Thursday, science correspondent Miles O'Brien explored the benefits and drawbacks of online voting. If you can shop and bank online, why not vote that way, he asks. Turns out there are plenty of reasons why: so far, online...

February 21, 2012  |   Photo by Getty Images. Fallout over internal memos that were leaked from the conservative Heartland Institute rattled the climate world again this week, when a climate researcher confessed to lying in order to obtain and distribute them. The Heartland...

February 16, 2012  |   Scientists and volunteers respond to stranded dolphins on the shores of Cape Cod. Video by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Since January 12, 179 dolphins have been found stranded on the sandy shores, mud flats, and shallow waters...

February 13, 2012  |   Updated: Feb. 14| We recently stumbled on this animated map that plots 2011's biggest earthquakes.* Each circle represents an earthquake -- the bigger the circle, the greater the magnitude. The line across the circle indicates the quake's depth. Most notable...

February 9, 2012  |   After decades drilling through more than two miles of ice in the coldest spot on Earth, Russian scientists announced this week that they reached their goal: a subglacial lake the size of Lake Ontario, which has been sealed off...

February 2, 2012  |   A suburban street is covered with silt forced out of the ground by liquefaction on February 24, 2011 after a 6.3 earthquake devastated the city of Christchurch two days earlier. Photo by AFP/Getty Images. On Wednesday's NewsHour broadcast, we...

January 26, 2012  |   Last week, a team of astronomers met in Arizona to discuss ambitious plans to see the unseeable. Using data pulled from more than 75 ground-based telescopes and assembled by a supercomputer, their plan is to capture,...

January 24, 2012  |   On Sunday, a gigantic solar flare erupted from out of the sun and began charging toward Earth at millions of miles an hour. This was a coronal mass ejection, which describes balls of gas consisting of charged particles and...

January 20, 2012  |   Last year, questions were raised over how much research on the dangerous H5N1 virus -- or avian flu -- should be published in scientific journals. H1N1 is not yet transmissible among humans, though scientists have created a strain that can...

January 19, 2012  |   This slide containing the cross section of a monkey-puzzle conifer tree was most likely collected from South America. Photo by British Geological Survey/Natural Environment Research Council. Updated: January 20, 6:30 p.m. ET| In April 2011, Howard Falcon-Lang, a paleobotanist,...

January 12, 2012  |   Scientists have found the biggest distant galaxy cluster ever seen, using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope in Chile. Image: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Hughes et al, Optical: ESO/VLT/Pontificia Universidad. Catolica de Chile/L.Infante & SOAR /Rutgers/F.Menanteau, IR: NASA/JPL/Rutgers/F.Menanteau. In...

January 5, 2012  |   Workers, soldiers and supersoldiers mingle in this ant colony. Photo by Alex Wild at alexanderwild.com. Updated: 6:30 p.m. ET | In 2006, while collecting ants on an abandoned property in central Long Island, biologist Ehab Abouheif of McGill University...

January 2, 2012  |   Using a precision formation-flying technique, the twin GRAIL spacecraft will map the moon's gravity field, as depicted in this artist's rendering. Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech On New Year's Eve, the first of two NASA spacecraft fired its engine and maneuvered...

December 20, 2011  |   This 'planet line-up' displays the first two Earth-size extrasolar planets, Kepler-20 e and Kepler-20 f, together with the Earth and Venus, ranked by their size. Image by Tim Pyle. Scientists have found two fiery hot, Earth-sized exoplanets whizzing around...

December 19, 2011  |   The bright orange Elkhorn coral off the coast of Florida have been devastated by a disease that scientists have tracked to human sewage. Elkhorn coral was at one time the most common coral in the Caribbean, but has declined...

December 15, 2011  |   In mid-July, NASA's Dawn spacecraft swung into a yearlong orbit around Vesta, the second-most massive object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Since then, it has been snapping pictures of the protoplanet's rugged surface and beaming them...

December 13, 2011  |   Protons collide at CERN's CMS experiment Image by Thomas McCauley, Lucas Taylor/CERN. What does the Higgs boson mean to physics, and how will particle physicists know when they've found it? Evidence of the elusive Higgs Boson may be peeking...

December 12, 2011  |   U.N. Climate Talks' Real-World Outcome Will be Determined in Asia The deal agreed to in Durban, South Africa will require major developing nations to make emissions cuts. This article is a good primer on the highlights of the U.N. meeting,...

December 8, 2011  |   It all started with a summer pool party and a Harvard neuroscientist who prefers to be called Bob. Bob -- aka Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta -- was splashing around the pool with his kids when science...

December 5, 2011  |   Researchers have discovered a monster black hole that appears to be the most massive found to date, as massive as 21 billion suns. This is one of two black holes found in elliptical galaxies some 300 million light years...

December 1, 2011  |   On Thursday's NewsHour broadcast, Miles O'Brien reports on the safety of the latest backscatter body-scanning machines that are widely used in American airport security. Hari Sreenivasan caught up with Miles this week to get some behind-the-scenes...

November 30, 2011  |   C. elegans worms, pictured above, are a model organism for studying cell behavior in space. Photo by Flickr via snickclunk. In December 2006, the Discovery space shuttle launched into orbit carrying a seven-member crew, its first Scandinavian astronaut and...

November 26, 2011  |   Update November 26| The Mars Science Laboratory launched into space at 10 am on Saturday, beginning its nine-month, 354-million-mile journey to Mars. Upon arrival, the one-ton spacecraft will hurl through the Mars atmosphere and deploy a...

November 22, 2011  |   Science panel: Get Ready for Extreme Weather A special report issued on Friday from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change focused on heat waves, floods, droughts, storms and other extreme weather events resulting from climate change. This was...

November 21, 2011  |   Mary Hermes of the University of Minnesota, Duluth is a tribal language educator whose research focuses on preserving endangered languages like the Great Lakes region's Ojibwe. Her team records, translates, transcribes and annotates conversations through the use of video...

November 17, 2011  |   In Mala Radhakrishnan's world, where oxygen and palladium atoms clamor to get into the most sought-after beaker and tortured carbon atoms become boron swans, chemistry is rife with mystery, jealousy and, yes, romance. Radhakrishnan, assistant professor...

November 15, 2011  |   In its ancient history, the moon had a magnetic field that may have lasted more than a billion years. Photo by NASA. Update: 7 pm ET, Nov 15| Lunar rocks collected during Apollo moon missions revealed a mysterious truth...

November 10, 2011  |   While shooting, the NewsHour and Safecast crew encounter an abandoned dog. Photo by Sean Bonner of Safecast.org. Update: 4 pm ET, Nov 11| At the tail end of Miles O'Brien's latest NewsHour report on radiation in Japan, a golden...

November 10, 2011  |   We officially launch a new feature today we're calling "Science Thursday." Each week, we'll feature an online-exclusive multimedia piece on a topic in the world of science and technology. Here's what's up first. On Thursday's NewsHour,...

November 8, 2011  |   This radar image of asteroid 2005 YU55 was obtained at 2:45 pm ET on Nov. 7 when the space rock was 860,000 miles from Earth. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech. As folks on the East Coast are feeding the dog, cooking...

November 7, 2011  |   On a regular basis, reporter Jenny Marder tackles a question in science and technology news. It's a feature we call "Just Ask." Today our topic is DNA. What is noncoding DNA, and why do we need it? In 1953,...

November 4, 2011  |   As river dams age, communities wrestle with how to how to repair and remove them, and a lack of scientific understanding on the subject doesn't help. How does dam removal affect river systems? Could it cause catastrophic flooding? And...

November 3, 2011  |   In NOVA's latest four-part series, physicist Brian Greene covers an astonishing swath of material in the world of physics: quantum mechanics, general relativity, light speed and gravity and the search for elusive subatomic particles. The series...

October 28, 2011  |   A satellite designed to study the Earth's weather and climate launched into space aboard a Delta II rocket early Friday morning. It lifted off from California's Vandenberg Air Force through clear skies and ideal weather. Watch video of the...

October 26, 2011  |   Photo by Flickr user the Waltherfamily. Scientists call them supercontrols: people who have lived past 100, and have somehow evaded the age-related diseases most can't escape after a century of life, such as heart disease, stroke and Alzheimer's disease....

October 24, 2011  |   Did Giant Stars Feed Blue Stragglers? Last week, scientists presented new theories on blue stragglers, stars that are bluer and brighter than other stars. The origins of how these stars formed have long confounded scientists. Astrophysicist Aaron Geller from Northwestern...

October 20, 2011  |   On the NewsHour Thursday, Science correspondent Miles O'Brien looks at the elusive science of earthquake prediction -- whether seismologists will ever be able to predict an earthquake with any certainty -- and how far they've come...

October 18, 2011  |   Update: October 21, 4:30 pm ET| The 2011 Dance Your PhD awards have been announced. The grand prize goes to Joel Miller, a biomedical engineer at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Winners can be found here. In 2008,...

October 13, 2011  |   The abalone shell before excavation from the 100,000 year old, Middle Stone Age-levels at the Blombos Cave in South Africa. Photo by Science/AAAS. Researchers have unearthed two abalone shells from a South African cave that they believe were used...

October 12, 2011  |   Photo by Flickr user Tom Olliver. Not long after ad marketing turns from waterparks and beach getaways to maple spice lattes and pumpkin facials, fall colors begin to announce the arrival of autumn -- and some years, more loudly...

October 10, 2011  |   Updated 6:00 pm Are We Entering a New Geologic Age? Some scientists say human activity has pushed the planet into a new geologic age. It has it's own name: Anthropocene, or Age of Man. Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen coined the...

October 5, 2011  |   Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman looks through a microscope at the Technion Institute of Technology. Photo by AFP/ Getty Images. The 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded on Wednesday to an Israeli scientist named Dan...

October 4, 2011  |   This colorized Chandra image of a supernova 1a remnant shows X-rays produced by high-energy particles and multimillion degree gas (red/green.) Photo by NASA/CXC/Rutgers/J.Hughes et al. Three U.S. physicists won the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for discovering, by...

October 3, 2011  |   A few facts about dragonflies: they hunt their prey, mate and lay eggs in mid-air. They have eyes that wrap around their head, giving them great visibility. They can fly straight up, straight down, hover like helicopters and disappear...

September 20, 2011  |   This image obtained by the framing camera on NASA's Dawn spacecraft shows the south pole of the giant asteroid Vesta. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA An asteroid with cliffs that climb 9-miles high, deep grooves and craters can be seen in...

September 16, 2011  |   The wrong kind of earthworm can upset the chemistry and nutrient dynamics of soil, damaging plant and tree growth, scientists say. Researchers have linked an invasive species of earthworms to stunted tree growth in parts of the Western Great...

September 7, 2011  |   The twists and turns of the last tracks left by humans on the moon mark the moon's surface in this image of the Apollo 17 site. Photo by NASA/Goddard/ASU. New images show the sharpest pictures yet of lunar rover...

August 29, 2011  |   A team of scientists are drilling a mile and a half under the Earth and retrieving and studying rock samples that exist in fault zones in order to better understand the mechanics of earthquakes. By doing so, geologists Chris...

August 25, 2011  |   Researchers show how a distant black hole devours a star. Video credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab. A supermassive black hole has been found shredding and swallowing a sun-sized star that wandered too close, according to two papers published...

August 23, 2011  |   The above map shows earthquake activity in the United States in the past week: These maps requires the Google Earth browser plugin. Download the plugin here. Updated at 6:32 pm ET: A 5.8-magnitude temblor shook much of the densely...

August 22, 2011  |   NASA To Share Telescope Cost The threatened James Webb Space Telescope, which is "perilously overbudget", may get a financial lifeline from other parts of NASA's budget, Nature News reports. As of now, the telescope is funded through the agency's science...

August 19, 2011  |   James A. Shannon Building at the National Institutes of Health. Photo by National Institutes of Health Library. A new study by the National Institutes of Health found a disturbing gap between the number of grants awarded to white scientists...

August 19, 2011  |   What if wastewater could be turned into energy? Science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on scientists from Penn State University that are developing microbial fuel cells that could channel energy produced when bacteria breaks down waste into electricity. "The goal...

August 17, 2011  |   The bacterium Serratia marcescens infected this coral from Looe Key in the Florida Keys, revealing the dead, white limestone skeleton underneath. Photo by James W. Porter. A Florida biologist has linked a vicious coral-killing pathogen in the Caribbean and...

August 15, 2011  |   Darkest Planet Found: Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light A Jupiter-size gas giant planet so black that it is less reflective than "the blackest acrylic paint" has been discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope. This National Geographic News story includes...

August 11, 2011  |   Photo by Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County Editor's note added on Aug. 12 at the end of this post Scientists have pieced together the first-ever fossil of a pregnant plesiosaur, a giant Mesozoic sea reptile from the...

August 9, 2011  |   After 16 days of battling fierce mosquito swarms and hauling heavy equipment along a poorly charted river, Nature Conservancy's M. Sanjayan and a group of young members from the Dene First Nation have completed their 200-mile...

August 8, 2011  |   US swimmer Diana Nyad jumps into the water at Ernest Hemingway Nautical Club in Havana on August 7, beginning her 103-mile journey. Photo by AFP/Getty Images. Update: August 9, 8:50 a.m. ET After 29 hours in the water, shifting...

August 5, 2011  |   For this week's Science Nation, Miles O'Brien reports on a neuroanatomist who is using real brains to build three-dimensional brain maps. Neuroanatomist Jacopo Annese, director of the brain observatory at University of California, Los Angeles, collects and slices up...

August 5, 2011  |   For the first time in 16 years, NASA is heading back to planet Jupiter to look beyond the planet's clouds and hopefully get some answers on the earliest days of the solar system. At 12:25 p.m., the four-ton Juno...

August 4, 2011  |   During its warmer seasons, dark fingerlike streaks that look like rivers, streams and small channels appear along the hills and slopes of Mars. The markings are seasonal: They swell during the planet's warm season and fade as it gets...

August 3, 2011  |   Photo by WTL via Flickr. No frequent flyer is a stranger to turbulence. But what causes it, and how dangerous is it? Turbulence is the random, chaotic motion of air, caused by changes in air currents. From inside an...

August 2, 2011  |   Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA Spacecraft Dawn's Detailed Images of Asteroid Vesta Mysterious tracks around asteroid Vesta's equator suggest that a tremendous impact by another unknown asteroid must have blasted Vesta during its early days. This comes from new images of...

August 1, 2011  |   "With so many products and so many stores and websites, how do we decide what to buy and where to shop?" NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien asks in the National Science Foundation's latest Science Nation piece. Computer scientists have...

July 28, 2011  |   Update: November 23, 2011, 7 am ET| On July 23, the Nature Conservancy's lead scientist, M. Sanjayan, embarked on a three-week river expedition through one of the most remote wilderness areas in the country with a group of teens from...

July 27, 2011  |   An asteroid is caught in a synchronized orbit with the Earth, dancing back and forth relative to our planet as both circle the sun, a team of Canadian scientists has discovered. The object, which for now is dubbed 2010...

July 26, 2011  |   America's space shuttles are grounded, but Russia is forging ahead with plans for future spaceflight missions. In addition to launching Soyuz rockets from the usual spaceports in Kazakhstan and Russia, the country will soon add a brand new working...

July 21, 2011  |   The Hubble Space Telescope peered 3 billion miles into space and found a fourth, previously unseen moon orbiting Pluto. As moons go, it is tiny -- only an estimated 8 to 21 miles across, compared to Pluto's largest moon,...

July 21, 2011  |   Space Shuttle Atlantis and her four-member crew landed just before sunrise this morning, marking the historic final landing of the space shuttle program and closing out the shuttle era's 30 years of manned spaceflight. Commander Chris Ferguson controlled the...

July 20, 2011  |   Legendary long distance swimmer Diana Nyad, 61, will attempt to be the first person to swim the 103 miles from Cuba to Key West without a shark cage. Photo by Miami Herald via Getty Images. What does swimming 103...

July 18, 2011  |   Raffaello Cargo Module Returned to Shuttle Bay The Atlantis astronauts have loaded nearly three tons of trash and broken hardware onto the Raffaello cargo module and moved it to the shuttle's payload bay in preparation for the return to Earth....

July 14, 2011  |   Photo credit: Young aspen trees in Yellowstone National Park. Photo by William Ripple, courtesy of Oregon State University. Sea otters eat sea urchins and sea urchins eat kelp. When sea otters are present, the coastal kelp forests maintain a...

July 13, 2011  |   Worries About a Gonorrhea 'Superbug' Gonorrhea is becoming increasingly resistant to the only drugs used to treat it. Resistant strains of the common sexually transmitted disease have failed antibiotic treatment in two cases now -- one in Japan, one in...

July 8, 2011  |   On the occasion of the last space shuttle launch, we looked back at some notable NewsHour coverage of the shuttle program over the years: 1986 | The Challenger disaster reaches back beyond our online resources, but we can point...

July 7, 2011  |   The space shuttle Atlantis launch will mark the last liftoff for NASA's shuttle program. NASA photo. Miles O'Brien has covered 40 space shuttle launches. He led CNN's coverage of the loss of space shuttle, Columbia, and he co-anchored astronaut...

July 6, 2011  |   Fingers wrinkled after an afternoon snorkeling. Photo by notanyron via Flickr Creative Commons Beachgoers know it well. You soak in the sea or the tub long enough, and your waterlogged fingers get puckered and funny looking. But why do...

July 4, 2011  |   Researcher Nikolai Konow has been studying the mechanics of chewing. Photo via Brown University. Fish do it. Lizards do it. Cows do it. Get your heads out of the gutter, readers. We're talking about chewing. Three years ago, scientists...

June 29, 2011  |   On Wednesday's NewsHour, science correspondent Miles O'Brien looks at a growing effort to get kids more enthused about science, engineering and math. The movement has been dubbed "Make." The event: the Bay Area Maker Faire, where scientists, engineers and builders...

June 28, 2011  |   Photo by Jamie Muchall via Flickr Creative Commons Tasmanian devils were sitting ducks for deadly cancer Another sad twist to the tale of the endangered Tasmanian devil. Human interference left these animals stripped of genetic diversity and prone to...

June 25, 2011  |   Updated 4:51 p.m. ET Celebrations erupted in the streets of New York on Friday, after a late night vote in the state legislature sent a same-sex marriage bill to Gov. Andrew Cuomo to sign into law. The move is...

May 24, 2011  |   When it comes to fruit and vegetables, brown marmorated stink bugs don't discriminate. They feast on peaches, plums, apples, and grapes, along with corn, tomatoes, peppers and soybeans. They extract fluid from the apples, turning them dry and corky,...

May 19, 2011  |   Full Video and Transcript Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is recovering well after a piece of her skull was repaired during surgery in Houston on Wednesday, reports her husband Mark Kelly, in an interview Thursday morning from space....

May 18, 2011  |   A dead zone -- already the size of the state of New Jersey -- is growing in the Gulf of Mexico, fueled by nutrient runoff from the swollen Mississippi River. This year, with floodwaters from the Birds Point levee...

May 16, 2011  |   Space shuttle Endeavour, NASA's youngest orbiter, blasted off into space for the final time at 8:56 am ET today, marking the next-to-last scheduled launch of the 30-year shuttle program. Just after 9 am ET, NASA confirmed...

May 12, 2011  |   New data confirms that an ocean of magma under the surface of Jupiter's moon, Io, feeds the moon's many active volcanoes. Io is the most volcanically active body in our solar system, with about 100 volcanoes erupting at any...

May 12, 2011  |   Photo courtesy Katrina Floyd A scary thing happened to Katrina Floyd on the morning of April 27. A thunderstorm swept through her northeast Alabama town of Ider in the early morning hours, uprooting trees and knocking out power and...

May 6, 2011  |   University of Arkansas biochemist James Hinton wanted his students to be able to visualize proteins to better understand their structure and function. So he developed a virtual computer program that blows proteins up into three-dimensional images, and allows students...

May 5, 2011  |   How Intel's 3D Tech Redefines the Transistor Intel* announced today it will base all upcoming processors on 3D, or tri-gate transistors. This marks a move toward computers getting cheaper and faster. But we're waging that not a lot of...

May 3, 2011  |   Flooding near Cairo, Ill.; U.S. Coast Guard courtesy photo The tiny town of Wyatt, Mo. lies at the easternmost part of the state, flanking the Mississippi River. It is a rich farmland, consisting of corn, soybean and rice fields....

May 3, 2011  |   Ever wonder how much our animals understand us when we talk to them? When parrots talk, are they consciously forming words or just mimicking sounds? Science correspondent Miles O'Brien addresses these questions in the National Science Foundation's* latest Science...

May 2, 2011  |   Photo courtesy of NASA. Updated May 2, 6:00 p.m. ET | NASA now says that repairs to replace and retest a faulty power distribution box has pushed the launch date to May 10 at the earliest. At the root...

April 29, 2011  |   Updated May 9 4:30 p.m. EST After more than a week of delays, NASA managers have given the go ahead for a May 16 launch. Engineers have installed a new switchbox, new thermostats and new wiring. And while they haven't...

April 28, 2011  |   Can a brief checklist help pediatricians detect autism as early as an infant's first-year checkup? New research released on Thursday in the Journal of Pediatrics, indicates that in some cases, it probably can. Dr. Karen Pierce, a neuroscience professor...

April 28, 2011  |   In 1816, a woman named Eliza Bryan wrote a letter to a friend in which she recounted "an awful noise, resembling loud but distant thunder, but more hoarse and vibrating... followed in a few minutes by the complete saturation...

April 26, 2011  |   The STAR detector at Brookhaven National Laboratory. This week, a team of researchers from the Brookhaven National Laboratory announced they had discovered helium's twin particle, antihelium-4, the heaviest antimatter nucleus observed yet. So what does that mean, and why...

April 25, 2011  |   Can Fear Slow Time? When David Eagleman fell from the roof of an Albuquerque construction site, time seemed to slow down. Now 39, and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor University, he is studying the brain's biological clocks, using...

April 22, 2011  |   Imagine being able to see inside a star during the moments before it explodes. In the National Science Foundation's* latest Science Nation piece, Science Correspondent Miles O'Brien shows us how Princeton University astrophysicist Adam Burrows uses computer generated, three-dimensional...

April 20, 2011  |   The Gulf of Mexico has always been an oily place. Early sea captains wrote in their log books of slicks of oil. Mayan Indians used natural tars to seal their water jugs and waterproof their canoes. As many as...

April 15, 2011  |   The microscopic scratches and pits found on ancient teeth can be used to reconstruct the diets of human ancestors and ancient animals, science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports in his latest piece for the National Science Foundation's Science Nation.* Anthropologist...

April 12, 2011  |   Fifty years ago Tuesday, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly in space. In the moments before launch, he recorded this message: What can I say to you during these last minutes before...

April 8, 2011  |   The National Science Foundation's* latest Science Nation piece looks at a team of conservateurs working to protect antique silver from overpolishing, heavy lacquer and the ravages of time. A material scientist and his team have developed a technique called...

April 6, 2011  |   Company Planning Biggest Rocket Since Man on Moon Space X's Falcon Heavy rocket will be the most powerful heavy rocket ever built, primed to carry twice as much weight into orbit as a NASA space shuttle, according to design plans...

April 6, 2011  |   What is the difference between the nuclear material in a bomb, versus a reactor? A nuclear reactor works by using the energy that is released when the nucleus of a heavy atom splits. That process is called fission. In...

April 1, 2011  |   There's an interactive spirit at the University of Arkansas' department of geosciences, where dendochronologist David Stahle encourages visitors to touch a cross-section of a redwood tree. In the latest Science Nation series for the National Science Foundation*, NewsHour Science...

March 30, 2011  |   The nuclear crisis in Japan has churned up memories of the Chernobyl meltdown, the worst nuclear accident in history. Miles O'Brien and crew returned last week to survey the scene, 25 years later. They took pictures of abandoned dolls, homes,...

March 29, 2011  |   As the world's attention remains transfixed on the crippled nuclear reactors in Japan, Science Correspondent Miles O'Brien approaches nuclear energy from another side of the world: the Ukraine, which suffered its own disaster nearly 25 years...

March 28, 2011  |   Stone Tools Cut Swathe Through Clovis History Thousands of stone scrappings and chips, believed to be discarded during an ancient toolmaking process, were unearthed by archaeologists in a Texas creek bed. Dating shows the chips to be as old as...

March 25, 2011  |   What can one baby, three puppets and a tricky Tupperware lid tell us about the roots of morality? Can infants distinguish between good and bad at such a young age? NewsHour science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on research being...

March 22, 2011  |   The Japanese government reported on Sunday that it had halted some food shipments to prevent tainted samples of milk and spinach from reaching consumers. Iodine 131 was found in milk samples in Kawamata, a town in Fukushima prefecture, where...

March 18, 2011  |   The massive earthquake in Japan knocked out the power grid around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, then its backup generators failed amid the ensuing tsunami. Then came the explosions, radiation emissions and dangerously hot nuclear fuel...

March 16, 2011  |   After its nearly seven-year voyage, NASA's Messenger space capsule is expected to pull into orbit around our smaller, denser sister planet, Mercury, at 8:54 pm EST on Thursday. Once there, it will spend a year collecting data on the...

March 15, 2011  |   After a powerful explosion on Tuesday, Japanese workers are still struggling to regain control of an earthquake and tsunami-damaged nuclear power plant amid worsening fears of a full meltdown. Which raises the questions: What exactly is a nuclear meltdown?...

March 14, 2011  |   Even as Japanese officials try to sort out whether jolted nuclear reactors could slip into full meltdown after Friday's massive earthquake and tsunami, experts are weighing in on how events unfolding there compare to previous high-profile nuclear disasters. The...

March 11, 2011  |   We close this week with an unusual collaboration in the world of science. In January, 2011, the military released an entire database of civilian casualties to the journal, Science -- a first for a science magazine. The data includes...

March 11, 2011  |   The 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck coastal Japan on Friday, devastating large swaths of the coast and spawning a powerful tsunami, was caused by the Pacific tectonic plate thrusting underneath the country, and forcing the seabed and ocean water upward....

March 9, 2011  |   Exploring icy planets, lunar oceans and martian soil should rank high on NASA's to-do list, an expert panel of the National Research Council concluded this week. But high costs could keep some of the most promising missions earthbound. Planet scientists...

March 7, 2011  |   One Scientist's Dramatic Exodus from Libya The skull of a valuable ancient elephant-like animal is housed in the Sarayy al-Hamra fort in Tripoli, the former site of the Libyan Museum of Natural History. This piece includes the tale of this...

March 4, 2011  |   The story of the Taurus XL rocket -- which launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base early Friday morning, failed to reach orbit and then crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean -- can perhaps be best told from this...

March 3, 2011  |   This image shows the interaction of astrocytes and neurons in the hippocampus of a rat. Astrocytes are stained green, neurons are shown in red, and cell nuclei in blue. A lesser-known brain cell may...

March 1, 2011  |   Two weeks after IBM's computer Watson trounced Jeopardy! masterminds Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Rep. Rush Holt dealt the upstart trivia champion computer a defeat on Monday. The New Jersey Democrat beat the scrappy computer $8,600 to $6,200, though...

March 1, 2011  |   Dinosaur-Hunting Hobbyist Makes Fresh Tracks for Paleontology Read about a 42-year-old British computer programmer-turned-paleontologist and his latest discovery: "a new dinosaur called Brontomerus mcintoshi, a sauropod with uncommonly large, powerful thighs." Video: Chandra Captures the...

February 28, 2011  |   Viewer question: Was there any comment on the two pieces of debris that came off about 5:48 into the video? . Updated: 4:40 pm EST | By 10:47 am EST Monday morning, astronaut Steven Bowen...

February 24, 2011  |   Updated 6:50 p.m. ET | After a series of scrubbed missions in late 2010, Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off from Cape Canaveral on Thursday, for the final time. The mission is STS-133. Time of launch: 4:53 p.m. ET Thursday. The...

February 23, 2011  |   At the National Press Club Wednesday morning, scientists showed a video of an ocean teeming with wildlife: colorful coral, crabs, sea anemone and bright orange starfish. The video underscored some not-so-new, but still sobering, news. If trends continue unchecked,...

February 22, 2011  |   "Humans have always fished. Even the ancestors of humans fished. The thing is, we've gotten so much better at it." That's how Reg Watson, a senior scientist at the University of British Columbia, opened a panel at the American...

February 21, 2011  |   Packing Away the Poison An article in Science News says fish in New York's Hudson River have developed a resistance to toxic PCBs and other pollutants. The story focuses on the Atlantic tomcod, but also the fish that eat the...

February 17, 2011  |   A hibernating black bear in a manmade "hibernaculum," a wooded area with straw for bedding, which mimicked a natural bear's den. Photo courtesy University of Alaska Fairbanks. Understanding the strange hibernation patterns of American black bears may give scientists...

February 16, 2011  |   Inside a storage room at Andrew's Air Force Base is a cluster of neutron radiation detectors, and alongside them, a tiny amount of plutonium, used for training drills. One detection device fits into a backpack. One is designed for...

February 15, 2011  |   In September 2001, letters containing anthrax were mailed to two senators and several news media outlets. Five people died and at at least 17 fell ill. Fear of anthrax gripped a nation already rocked by the 9/11 attacks. Seven...

February 14, 2011  |   X-rays Show Why Van Gogh's Yellows Have Darkened A particle accelerator helps to explain why the bright yellows in Van Gogh paintings fade to brown over time. This piece uses an animated video to explain the chemical reaction that causes...

February 14, 2011  |   DetectFlashDecision_Blog; During Monday prime-time, "Jeopardy!" champions will face off against IBM's new computer, Watson, developed to dominate human brain-game champs. To better understand Watson, science correspondent Miles O'Brien forged bravely into the firestorm, challenging the machine to...

February 7, 2011  |   Maps, Activism and Technology: Check-Ins with a Purpose Introducing Sukey, the "maptivism" app. Detailed in this column is a sort of Four Square for nonviolent organizing: location-based mobile social networking that allows people to check in during demonstrations, track crowds...

February 7, 2011  |   Bed bugs are survivors. They grow as large as ladybugs and can live a year without eating. They move from room to room and leave itchy, bloody welts on skin when they bite. And they wreak havoc on the...

February 6, 2011  |   Two solar probes have beamed back the first full images of the sun. The identical twin STEREO spacecraft were launched in 2006, and moved into orbiting positions at opposite sides of the sun on Sunday. NASA has combined images...

January 31, 2011  |   Federal guidelines on what Americans should -- and should not -- be eating were released on Monday. Among them: reduce daily salt intake to less than 2,300 milligrams; less than 1,500 mg if you're 51 and older, according the...

January 31, 2011  |   The Brittle-Stars Danced. The Stingray Smoked a Pipe. Sea creatures with bodies like snakes and heads like sea urchins. Monkeys with Lollipop Paws. Dancing brittle-stars. A wonderful, whimsical article on the connection between nonsense verse and biology and the role...

January 27, 2011  |   A large sampling of ancient stone tools unearthed from a once-fertile area in the Persian Gulf Basin may indicate that early humans migrated from Africa much earlier than previously thought. The artifacts, dug up from the Jebel Faya archeological...

January 27, 2011  |   Hubble has peered back into the far-ancient past and spotted a tiny galaxy of blue stars, possibly the oldest ever seen, researchers reported in the journal Nature. In images, it's underwhelming - just a faint smudge of light. But...

January 25, 2011  |   Neutrinos are teeny, tiny, nearly massless particles that travel at near lightspeeds. Born from violent astrophysical events like exploding stars and gamma ray bursts, they are fantastically abundant in the universe, and can move as easily through lead as...

January 24, 2011  |   Giant Crayfish Found in Tennessee is new Species A new species of crayfish was spotted climbing out from under a rock in Tennessee, according this Reuters story. It is five inches long -- that's twice the size of other crayfish...

January 20, 2011  |   Despite slight variations in data, a flurry of reports from different agencies has reached the same general conclusion: 2010 takes the prize as one of the hottest years ever recorded. The World Meteorological Organization, which released its global temperature...

January 18, 2011  |   Since as early as the 1930s, a variation on simple table salt has been used to keep wintry roads from getting dangerously slippery. The mechanism is simple: When liquid water freezes into ice, the loose water molecules arrange themselves...

January 17, 2011  |   Why Dire Climate Warnings Boost Skepticism Dire predictions on climate change don't seem to be working. Even while scientific evidence that humans are causing global warming continues to mount, belief in climate change doesn't. So why the disconnect? A small...

January 13, 2011  |   Scientists have discovered a four-foot-long, meat-eating dinosaur, with serrated teeth and long finger bones, that roamed the earth some 230 million years ago. The fossils are among the earliest dinosaur bones ever found, and the finding, which was published...

January 13, 2011  |   As muddy river water swept through parts of Australia, inundating more than 20,000 homes and claiming at least 15 lives, it also poured into the ocean, where it now threatens one of the country's most precious natural ecosystems: The...

January 11, 2011  |   And what constitutes an "earthlike planet" anyway? The Kepler Space telescope has found a small, rocky planet, the smallest yet found orbiting a star outside our solar system, the Kepler team announced Monday at the annual meeting of the...

January 10, 2011  |   In Women's Tears, a Chemical that Says, 'Not Tonight, Dear' When a man gets close enough to sniff a woman's tears, his sex drive and hormone levels drop, but his mood and empathy remain unchanged, according to a new study,...

January 6, 2011  |   Researchers collect water samples to study bacteria and methane gas. Photo by Elizabeth Crapo/NOAA As soon as oil began spewing into Gulf of Mexico waters, bacteria went to work, gobbling up mass amounts of methane. And as the oil...

January 5, 2011  |   DetectFlashDecision_Blog; On Wednesday's NewsHour, Miles O'Brien reports on the way that teens interact with technology, and how Facebooking, texting, gaming and constant digital multitasking may be shaping developing adolescent brains. Do teens pay a price for the...

January 4, 2011  |   On New Years Day, residents of Beebe, Ark., awoke to find some 5,000 dead blackbirds strewn across roads, lawns and rooftops. Three days later, 125 miles from Beebe, thousands of fish were found dead on riverbanks and floating along...

December 27, 2010  |   A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning A profile of Charles David Keeling, who created the first instruments to accurately measure carbon dioxide in the air and collected samples from the remote top of Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. This...

December 21, 2010  |   Here's this week's Just Ask! science query: At what point would a spacecraft approaching the sun vaporize? -- Bob Rinehuls We all know the tale of Icarus. He attempts to escape imprisonment in Crete with wings made of feather,...

December 21, 2010  |   Getty Images Last night, for the first time in 372 years, the winter solstice coincided with a total lunar eclipse. For three hours and 28 minutes in the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the earth's umbral shadow crept across...

December 20, 2010  |   During a total lunar eclipse, the moon has been known to turn dazzling colors: blood red, deep copper orange, and sometimes dark grey or brown. For those of you tough enough to get out of your warm beds and...

December 20, 2010  |   Biochemist Photo-Fiddler Here's a fun, visual story on a GlaxoSmithKline biochemist who, in his spare time, used small mirrors, PVC pipes and an old computer hard drive to design a specialized camera that snaps photos of insects in flight. His...

December 18, 2010  |   A federal report released Friday detailed the levels of oil that remain lodged in sea floor sediment around the blown-out BP well in the Gulf of Mexico. The oil was found in concentrations too small to collect in most...

December 16, 2010  |   A study by a team of high-profile agencies says that polar bears have a chance -- if we sharply cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Polar bears depend on sea ice platforms to hunt for...

December 14, 2010  |   As a cold front settles across the Eastern seaboard, we turn wistfully to thoughts of the sun for this week's Just Ask! science post. This one comes from a reader, Amanda Teicher, who wants to know: "How does sunscreen...

December 13, 2010  |   Epidemiology: Fear in the Dust Nature News reports on the mineral erionite, which has been linked to startling rates of the rare lung condition, mesothelioma, in some Turkish villages. It turns out dangerous levels of erionite are also lurking in...

December 9, 2010  |   As global temperatures rise, glaciers are rapidly losing mass, especially in low-lying, arid regions, according to a report released by the United Nations Environment Program this week. Glacier melt could sap water resources and cause severe flooding in some...

December 8, 2010  |   .bbpBox12536450318860288 {background:url #C0DEED;padding:20px;} p.bbpTweet{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:8px;padding-top:12px;height:40px;border-top:1px solid #fff;border-top:1px solid #e6e6e6} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author{line-height:19px} p.bbpTweet span.metadata span.author img{float:left;margin:0 7px 0 0px;width:38px;height:38px} p.bbpTweet a:hover{text-decoration:underline}p.bbpTweet span.timestamp{font-size:12px;display:block} Beautiful launch! Dragon is in orbit. Will provide status updates as available.Wed...

December 7, 2010  |   If you expanded an atom to the size of a baseball, what would it look like? And how would the inside look if you sliced it open? The nucleus is the atom's central core and contains more than 99.9...

December 6, 2010  |   Arsenic, Bacteria and Alien Life: Lessons from an Internet Frenzy The Guardian has a nice writeup from an astrobiologist on the speculation, media frenzy and false stories that rolled out along with last week's discovery that scientists had found bacteria...

November 30, 2010  |   DetectFlashDecision_Blog; It's time for our weekly Just Ask feature, where the experts tackle your questions on science and technology. John Eichelberger, a volcano expert with the U.S. Geological Survey, answers the question, "Why Does the Earth Have...

November 29, 2010  |   Aging Ills Reversed in Mice Scientists have partially reversed age-related degeneration in mice, according to a study published online in the journal Nature and reported by the Wall Street Journal. Scientists achieved this by manipulating telomeres, DNA units that cap...

November 26, 2010  |   DetectFlashDecision_Blog; In April, Web traffic from tens of thousands of computer networks, including the U.S. Defense Department, the U.S. Senate and NASA, were diverted through China. A congressionally chartered panel concluded last week that China's state-based telecommunications...

November 24, 2010  |   Regarding the expanding universe which recent observations shows is accelerating: I understand that not everything is expanding, just the space between galaxies. Is that correct? If so, why? -- Bill Ellena It's true -- not everything is expanding. The...

November 22, 2010  |   Brain Tumors Grow Their Own Blood Supply Drugs designed to choke off blood to brain tumors often fail, and two new studies published online in the journal Nature help explain why. Tumor cells may be bypassing the drugs by morphing...

November 19, 2010  |   In a landscape of rolling hills and flat cow fields, Mole Hill Mountain is a peculiar sight. Jutting severely above the west Virginia countryside, it is an outlier; it is Harrisonburg's sore thumb. Mole Hill is the remnant of...

November 18, 2010  |   Extragalactic Expat: Newfound Exoplanet Likely Came from Another Galaxy This week, the journal, Science has a study on an exoplanet more massive than Jupiter that came from another galaxy and then got consumed by ours. It's the first verifiable extragalactic...

November 17, 2010  |   The Atlantic bluefin tuna has been devastated to near extinction by overfishing, pollution and lagging confidence in the agency tasked with protecting it. Conservationists have slammed the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas for mismanaging the endangered...

November 17, 2010  |   It's official: our revamped Science page has launched. Straight from the newsroom, here's a primer on what you'll get: DetectFlashDecision_Blog; We'll be featuring the reports from our science correspondent, Miles O'Brien, along with online extras for each piece:...

November 15, 2010  |   DetectFlashDecision_Blog; Some 168,000 years ago, in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud, a massive star collapsed and then spectacularly exploded, releasing 100 times the amount of energy than the sun will release over its lifetime...

November 15, 2010  |   Robert Kirshner, an astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, answers the question, "What is a supernova?" A supernova explosion is something where you see a star that you hadn't seen before suddenly turn billions of times brighter than...

November 15, 2010  |   A team of Harvard astrophysicists has discovered what they believe is an infant black hole, the youngest ever found in our cosmic backyard. The data indicate that it is just 30 years old for some historical context, that's toward...

November 15, 2010  |   Beached Dolphins Often Deaf, Study Finds "In a world where hearing is as valuable as sight," deafness may be a major factor in what's stranding dolphins on seashores, The Washington Post reports. Researchers studied dolphins and other marine mammals by...

November 5, 2010  |   Photo credit: NASA The final launch of space shuttle Discovery was scrubbed for the fourth time in as many days Friday, raising questions among some space watchers on when old becomes too old. Two hours into fueling NASA's longest...

October 29, 2010  |   On Friday's NewsHour, science correspondent Miles O'Brien reports on our fascination with robots and the efforts underway to make them as human as possible. So just how close are we to being replaced by robots? Observe the case of "BigDog,"...

October 26, 2010  |   The black-footed ferret, once thought extinct, has been successfully reintroduced to parts of its former habitat. A decade-long effort involving nearly 200 scientists and a colossal database has reached a simple conclusion: conservation works. But there's not enough of...

October 21, 2010  |   There is water on the moon ... along with a long list of other compounds, including, mercury, gold and silver. That's according to a more detailed analysis of the chilled lunar soil near the moon's South Pole, released as...

October 18, 2010  |   They're too young to vote, but they're already designing cancer-fighting therapies, solar-powered cars and robots to combat distracted driving. One team of students cooked and sold tamales to raise enough money to build a better wheelchair for a classmate...

October 6, 2010  |   Updated 12:51 p.m. ET | Carbon took center stage again Wednesday as three pioneering chemists won the Nobel for their development of palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling, a form of carbon-carbon bonding. The molecular tool, described by the committee as "great art in...

October 5, 2010  |   Two Russian scientists will share $1.5 million and the Nobel Prize in physics for their "groundbreaking experiments" on the world's thinnest and strongest material, graphene. Graphene is just one atom thick, but 100 times stronger than the steel, and highly...

September 23, 2010  |   In the early days of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster, estimates varied wildly on the amount of oil gushing from the blown-out well. As spring turned to summer and the oil kept flowing, the government revised its calculations. And...

September 22, 2010  |   At a recent visit to the Wright County Egg farm, FDA inspectors found decaying rodent corpses, chicken carcasses, live mice and thousands of flies. One building had so much manure oozing through the door that it wouldn't shut. Lawmakers at...

September 13, 2010  |   By the end of a Brookings Institution event on science and technology education, people were referring to superstring theorist Brian Greene as "rabbi." Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, the moderator, took it a step further, calling him "Rabbi Rev. Father...

September 9, 2010  |   As children mature, their brains bloom madly with activity -- growing, pruning and rewiring. During this process, some connections strengthen, while others die off. The brain is reorganizing itself with experience. Researchers from the Washington University School of Medicine have...

September 8, 2010  |   In its long-awaited internal report on this summer's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP blamed contractors Halliburton and Transocean for many of the problems leading up to the country's worst-ever oil spill -- igniting anger from the companies blamed. No single...

September 1, 2010  |   Hurricane Earl, Sept 1, 2010 Updated 5:30p.m. ET Forecasters announced late Wednesday that Hurricane Earl has become a Category 4 storm. Posted 2:30p.m. ET The big question facing hurricane watchers is not whether Hurricane Earl will change its...

August 31, 2010  |   A management overhaul, more transparency, more alternative views and a stronger communications policy. These are among the recommendations that the InterAcademy Council a multi-national group of science academies, has urged for the U.N. Climate Panel, the international body charged...

August 10, 2010  |   Doctors may be able to reliably predict a person's chance of developing Alzheimer's disease from a simple analysis of their cerebral spinal fluid, according to a study released Monday. The study, published in the journal Archives of Neurology, analyzed three...

July 7, 2010  |   The Massacusetts Bay Transportation Authority has had to repair so-called "heat kinks" during recent high temperatures. The triple-digit temperatures pummeling the East Coast this week present many dangers: heatstroke, dehydration and power outages. This week, the Washington, D.C., Metro...

May 26, 2010  |   Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be rolling out simplified privacy controls Wednesday. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. Facebook will unveil new, easier-to-use privacy controls Wednesday, a company executive announced on Tuesday. The announcement comes after heavy criticism,...

March 29, 2010  |   Providing coverage to children with pre-existing conditions is a cornerstone of the new health law, and central to President Obama's argument for reform. But on Sunday, The New York Times reported that insurance companies may have found loopholes to sidestep...

March 25, 2010  |   European researchers have found a 40,000-year-old shard of pinkie bone that may be evidence of a previously unknown human species. The finding, which was published Wednesday in the journal Nature, adds a new twist to the evolving story of...

February 19, 2010  |   By mapping the genetic code of malignant tumors, researchers have developed a new technique to identify and track cancer: a blood test derived from a patient's unique DNA. The finding is the latest in a growing field of personalized medicine,...