Buying Green: 9 Environmentally Inventive Products
Carbon-friendlier alternatives for your life
Stories by Susannah F. Locke
Six Images of Nano-scale Worlds
Artist Michael Oliveri captures the tiniest products of materials science
Stock-Market Strategy Halts Fishing Collapse
Novel way to fight the decades-long decline of fish populations
Buying Green: Products for Sustainable Living
Flashlights that power themselves, bags that dissolve, and more
Exoplanet orbiting red giant gives hints of Earth's future
Astronomers have discovered a new planet in another solar system orbiting a red giant star that provides clues into what may happen to our own solar system five billion years from now when our own, younger sun becomes a gigantic old star.
The exoplanet (a planet in another solar system) is about six times the mass of Jupiter and orbits about 40 percent closer to its star, dubbed HD 102272, than Earth does around the sun...
Bug vs. bug: How do mosquitoes survive deadly viruses unscathed?
Why can mosquitoes carry deadly viruses without succumbing to them and live on to give humans West Nile, dengue fever, and a host of other fatal illnesses.
Space shuttle Endeavour creates sonic booms over California as it comes in for a landing
Residents of southern California were treated to a pair of sonic booms as the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour passed overhead yesterday en route to its safe landing at Edwards Air Force Base...
How did turtles get their shells?
Ever wonder how a turtle got its shell? You're not the only one. Evolutionary biologists and paleontologists have long been stumped by the question. But a recently unearthed turtle fossil, the oldest on record, may hold the answer...
Smut spammer ordered to pay Facebook record $873 million
The never-ending war against spam scored a rare victory recently when a federal judge in San Jose, California ordered a prolific spammer to pay Facebook a whopping $873 million in damages for unleashing a torrent of unsavory messages on the social network's members...
Ocean turning to acid at lightning speed
Increased carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is making the Pacific coast acidic far more rapidly than previously believed, potentially wreaking havoc for creatures living in it that are unable to tolerate the swiftly changing environment.
Ecologists at the University of Chicago tracked the acidity of the Pacific off an island close to Washington state over the course of eight years...
Troubled waters: striped bass moms pass on harmful pollutants to babies
The striped bass population in San Francisco Bay has been plummeting since the 1970s and now scientists know why: fish moms are passing down damaging pollutants in the water to their young, according to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ...
Candid criminal: Undercover psychologists find bad behavior may be contagious
Attention, shoppers: If the cart you selected has a handle greased with Vaseline, you may be an unwitting participant in an undercover experiment.
Ditto if you find an envelope stuffed with cash hanging out of a mailbox...
Pygmy tarsier, a tiny primate, rediscovered in Indonesia
The tiny Furby-like pygmy tarsier, presumed to be extinct, was found during a recent expedition to Indonesia. And the cuddly, huge-eyed nocturnal critter is the very definition of cute.
Cancer drug cures Type 1 diabetes in mice
A new study shows that the cancer drugs imatinib (also known as Gleevec by Novartis) and sunitinib (Sutent, made by Pfizer) halt diabetes in mice.
A team from the University of California, San Francisco and Berkeley-based drug maker Plexxikon found that most of the mice manipulated to have Type 1 diabetes no longer had diabetes symptoms after just a few weeks on either of the two drugs...
Dancing with the robots: Austrian hexapods
Move over, HAL, there's an entire brigade of rock 'em, sock 'em robots in town. They're dexterous, graceful, and they can . . . dance ?
This hot YouTube video features a bunch of hexapods (six-legged robots) getting down to the beat with choreographed bounces, splits and shimmies for the third annual hexapod robot dance contest...
How bleach kills germs
Bleach is the king of microbe killers, but before now no one knew quite why. Researchers report today in the journal Cell that bleach – like heat – kills bacteria by making proteins fall apart...
India's Chandrayaan 1 enters lunar orbit
The Indian space probe Chandrayaan 1 adjusted its orbit around the moon in one of its final maneuvers before releasing a lunar impactor.
Chandrayaan 1 entered into an elliptical orbit around the moon on Saturday, 17 days after blasting off from Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota...
Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change
When sea ice disappears some polar inhabitants advance, whereas others retreat
Do Migraines Lower Breast Cancer Risk?
Hormones or pain pills may be the key
Flying on a Wing and ... Paper
Paper airplane contest awards the flimsy fliers that are a cut above the rest
