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Features and Background
The latest organism to have its genome sequenced is a kind of godfather, a puppet master of millions of insects, a force driving evolution, and a male-killer supreme ... [more]
US researchers say that the use of certain eye injuries to diagnose shaken baby syndrome is not supported by scientific evidence ... [more]
There is no link between abortion and and breast cancer, according to a comprehensive review of 53 studies in 16 countries ... [more (registration required)] ... [more]
Ice age to warming -- and back? In the past, the planet's climate has changed ten degrees in as little as ten years ... [more]
Conspicuous construction: Tallest building! Longest bridge! Fastest train! Behold, the next engineering marvels to dazzle the world. ... [more]
Can prawns give you cancer? Is Scottish salmon deadly? Will chicken from the Far East kill you? Just what is the truth about food scares? ... [more]
There is life on Mars, one NASA-funded microbiologist has told a conference -- unfortunately it's just spaceship-borne contamination ... [more]
No sex please, we're bdelloid rotifers. Biologists are looking at a major class of animals that have evolved without the help of males. And life's been great ... [more]
Monitoring on the move : A wireless wristband that can monitor heart rates and blood oxygen levels could allow patients to get out and about during their recovery ... [more]
Cancer patients who use complementary medicine could be causing themselves more harm than good by risking dangerous interactions with standard drugs ... [more]
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The spread of a new simian virus among bushmeat hunters in Central Africa suggests that future pandemics might follow HIV out of the jungle ... [more]
A new type of massive subatomic particle -- a "charmed pentaquark" -- has been created fleetingly, but it is already puzzling theorists ... [more]
Surf's up on Mars! Or at least it was once, says NASA, which has found signs of a shallow salty sea ... [more]
Raising vitamin D levels may help to ward off breast cancer, according to UK research ... [more]
Opponents of evolution often search for examples of natural complexity that could have only been created by design. Ironically, one of the most successful, intricate examples of complexity in nature is something creationists never mention: a tumor. ... [more]
Australian researchers have found an ingenious new use for iron dust and magnets: dry-cleaning oil-drenched birds ... [more]
The rapid spread of West Nile virus across the US is alarming -- and an epidemiological mystery. It looks as if it may be the fault of hybrid mosquitoes ... [more]
Undisturbed Amazonian rainforest is changing in striking ways -- and increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may be the cause ... [more]
The birth of hope: Afghan midwives are teaching expectant mothers to replace superstition with sanitation ... [more]
More and bigger blackouts lie ahead for the US, unless today's dumb electricity grid can be transformed into a smart, responsive and self-healing digital network -- in short, an "energy internet" ... [more]
A simple change to the diet of dairy cattle yields healthier milk -- and butter that spreads straight from the fridge ... [more]
Women are born with all the eggs they will ever have, right? New research says this basic tenet of reproductive biology may be wrong ... [more]
Low-carb diets might be a breakthrough in addressing obesity, but their success entails even greater consumption of global resources ... [more]
Elephant-repelling chillies have proven to be the key to easing tension between local needs and conservation objectives in Malawi ... [more]
The poetics of baby talk: All that cooing, rhyming and repetition when parents talk to their babies may not seem terribly dignified -- but it helps infants learn to appreciate literature, music, and dance ... [more]
The US Air Force has filed a futuristic flight plan as it prepares for potential wars in space ... [more]
A new software technique could help cellphone users lie more convincingly about where they are by creating bogus background noise ... [more]
Tired? Got the blues? Maybe testosterone can help! Then again, maybe not ... [more]
US researchers have found a use for leftover liposuction fat: it's a good (and cheap) source of adult stem cells ... [more]
Physics can't find the biggest thing in the known universe, so it's looking beyond our paltry three dimensions ... [more]
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Books and Media
Beast master: Alexis Rockman paints like Rembrandt and thinks like Darwin. He doesn't just make art -- he remakes natural history ... [more]
Family activists and free-speech types have united against an internet porn segregation proposal -- and they're both wrong, says Michelle Cottle ... [more]
This is your brain in love: In Why We Love, Helen Fisher looks to neurochemistry to unravel the experience of romantic passion ... [more]
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Reading online is a great way to gulp information. But for the sheer joy of sipping and savouring words, there's nothing like the real thing ... [more]
With Against the Grain, Richard Manning wants to freeze your fork in the air so you can see naked the food perched at the end of it -- and its cost to the Earth ... [more]
Telling a tale with too many words: Hypergraphia, a rare compulsion to keep writing, has plagued (or blessed, depending on one's perspective) some of our most prolific authors ... [more]
Nasty, brutish, and short: Jeffrey Masson's "divertingly amateurish" style in The Pig Who Sang to the Moon is likely to broaden the audience for the animal-rights movement in a way that Peter Singer and Matthew Scully never could, says BR Myers ... [more]
In The Radioactive Boy Scout, Ken Silverstein tells a cautionary tale of US teenager David Hahn, who almost managed to build a breeder reactor out of household items in his potting-shed lab ... [more]
The digital divide has never been more stark. While Western journalists at a world summit on information debated global policymaking, African participants noted that their newsroom colleagues didn't even have computers ... [more]
The world needs an oil change -- sooner rather than later -- warns David Goodstein in Out of Gas ... [more]
Britain's main scientific body has warned that open-access journals may be a threat to the vitality of the country's scientific community ... [more] But open-access publishers disagree ... [more]
Malady maker: Bored with all the usual, commonplace illnesses? Perhaps it's time to consider contracting a metafictional disease: brain worms, spastic denial (featuring crazed head-shaking), or diseasemaker's croup ... [more]
The best way to avoid being deceived by magic tricks -- or pseudoscience -- is to understand them, say Georges Charpak and Henri Broch in Debunked! (reviewed by Freeman Dyson) ... [more]
Psychiatrists may be unintentionally "curing" us of lovesickness and other aspects of romantic love with modern antidepressant medications, argue anthropologist Helen Fisher and psychiatrist James Thomson Jr in Fisher’s recent book, Why We Love ... [more]
Women have for many years been asking the question: Why won't men ask for directions? Richard C Francis doesn't claim to know the answer -- but he's sure sociobiologists don't know, either ... [more]
Geeks around the globe are waxing clever in their efforts to help Chinese web users bypass China's internet censorship ... [more]
Scientists behaving badly: Journal editors have revealed researchers' wicked ways ... [more]
Longtime online news consultant Vin Crosbie says newspapers must change their approach to publishing news -- online and off -- if they want to survive ... [more]
Living life in virtual reality: Almost Real takes a documentary look at how online connections can supplant flesh-and-blood ones ... [more]
The near-simultaneous release of eight new computer virus variants may or may not indicate a coordinated attack. No matter: in 2004, the worms are coming in waves ... [more]
Iain Bamforth's collection of writing about medical matters, The Body in the Library, is a valuable contribution to our understanding, says Phil Whitaker ... [more]
Every bit is a work of art: The Art of Abstraction, opening in Spain, puts the work of hackers right alongside Picasso and Dalí ... [more]
Virtual reality therapy can dull intractable pain by sidetracking the brain's processing power ... [more]
In Opening Skinner's Box, Lauren Slater revisits 20th-century psychology's greatest hits (and misses) ... [more]
The supposed link between MMR and autism is "entirely flawed" -- and tainted by conflict of interest -- according to a report in The Lancet. The journal says it regrets publishing Andrew Wakefield's research on the combined vaccine ... [more]
US scientific publishers are divided in their reaction to a new US ban on publishing research from Iran, Libya, Sudan and Cuba ... [more]
Genetic engineering carries the potential to strip the human race of its identity, argues Bill McKibben in Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age ... [more]
Deadly mistakes: Medical errors are said to kill 100,000 Americans per year. In Internal Bleeding, Robert M Wachter and Kaveh Shojania say it's not the doctors' fault. Mostly ... [more]
Identifying networks of mutual acquaintances could help sort e-mail friends from foes ... [more]
Luminous moments: Marine biologist Richard Shelton's memoir The Longshoreman describes not so much the creatures that largely fill his book as the soul of the man whose sensibility and view of life make him one of the world's pre-eminent observers of natural phenomena ... [more]
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Analysis and Opinion
One of the beauties of biology is that its facts can become our metaphors, says Bioneers founder Kenny Ausubel. These underlying codes may also serve as inspiring parables for how we might organize a more just, humane, and authentically sustainable society ... [more]
Phil Cheney, Australia's foremost expert on bushfires, talks about fighting fire with fire, how writing poetry helps him cope, and what we can learn from Aboriginal history ... [more]
Man or machine?: Charles Rubin ruminates on the quest for "superior performance, and why human excellence is different from making ourselves into well-bred animals or well-crafted machines ... [more]
Architect William McDonough wants to reinvent everything from tennis shoes to cars so we can consume as much as we wish without harming the planet. The key, he says, is to create ecologically intelligent abundance ... [more]
Fishing for answers: Want to know how much mercury is in your tuna salad? Don't ask the FDA, warns Anne Harding ... [more]
The new science wars: Chris Mooney considers whether the Bush administration is the most anti-science regime of modern times ... [more]
Courts and medical organizations have long recognized a patient's right to make healthcare decisions free from governmental intrusion. Why should pregnant women have fewer rights than other patients, asks Lynn M Paltrow ... [more]
The politics of science advice: The Bush administration has been accused of ignoring the scientific community on issues such as global warming, while the UK government's chief scientific advisor has been urged to exercise constraint in his comments on the issue. What's going on? ... [more]
They risked their lives for the Hubble Space Telescope and did so gladly. Now, many of the astronauts who worked on Hubble are dismayed and bewildered by NASA's decision to pull the plug on the mighty observatory ... [more]
Methuselah and us: Diana Schaub discusses the pursuit of “ageless bodies,” and whether living longer will change what it means to live well ... [more]
Michael Scherer asks: Is the US government's expansion of biodefense research paving the way for the bioweapons of the future? ... [more]
Despite George Bush's best efforts to stop human enhancement, the spirit of Vannevar Bush is rising to smite him, says James Hughes ... [more]
Richard Hoagland has an unusual view of space, encompassing NASA-led conspiracies, sentient aliens and a mile-long translucent Martian worm -- and astronomer Philip Plait is tired of hearing about it ... [more]
The President's Council on Bioethics face a bleak future now that they are going to focus on the brain, says Carl Zimmer. Their brains don't work they way they think they do ... [more]
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The Ecstasy factor: Did bad science slander a generation's favourite drug? A new study aims to salvage E's reputation ... [more]
A magnificent obsession: DA Henderson helped rid the world of smallpox -- now he's focusing on bioterrorism ... [more]
DARPA's Wild Kingdom: Weaponised bees, robotic rats, sleepless soldiers; does Mother Nature stand a chance in the face of the Pentagon's new science? ... [more]
The dangers of silicone breast implants are widely known -- although Dow Corning's PR campaign almost managed to turn around public sentiment. Less well known is that saline is potentially as dangerous, says Lila Rajiva ... [more]
The new Scopes Trials: When a President starts appointing scientists as he does campaign staffers, we risk an era of Lysenkoism in the US, warn Eric Alterman & Mark Green ... [more]
Romance in the information age: Love and dating are increasingly high-tech affairs. But is this new world of full-disclosure and Ph.D.-certified matchmaking good for the spontaneity of romance? Or the permanence of marriage? ... [more]
George Bush's space exploration plan "pulls the rug out from under our scientists" and might waste too much money to ever put astronauts on Mars, warns US space pioneer John Glenn ... [more]
For the last six years parents have been tortured by a myth, says Gerald DeGroot. Autism is a mystery, not a medical conspiracy ... [more]
Researchers are launching studies to see if daily doses of a promising AIDS drug can prevent HIV infection in high-risk people. But the studies are already sparking debate about unsafe sex and unfair distribution ... [more]
Looking for the dawn of medicine in archaeology, rather than in human evolution, is like looking for stars through the wrong end of a telescope, says Carl Zimmer ... [more]
After more than 100 years of large-scale, worldwide effort to redirect and redistribute the world's water, it may be that the best answers to global water woes are much smaller, simpler, and less expensive ... [more]
Widespread misgivings about the Green Revolution are based on myths and wilful misunderstanding, argues Thomas DeGregori ... [more]
Why give a cactus human hair? Or grow wings from pig tissue? Three biotech artists explain why they do what they do ... [more]
Jeremaiad for Belarus: Eighteen years after the Chernobyl disaster, radiation continues its deadly work on the people who survive in this rolling farm country, eating radioactive mushrooms and cutting down contaminated trees for lumber ... [more]
The clone is out of the bottle: Now we know the recipe. Can a cloned baby be far behind? ... [more]
The hybrid highway: The hydrogen-fueled transit vision being peddled in Washington and Sacramento obscures a more achievable alternative, argues David Morris ... [more]
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