Scientific American News

People who live farther from the equator have larger eye sockets than their tropical counterparts, a new study finds. And as people inhabited higher and higher latitudes , eye socket size grew along with the northerly or southerly extent of their migrations.

PHILADELPHIA -- When the Allies needed a weapon terrible enough to end World War II, scientists devised the atomic bomb. When the Soviet Union hurled Sputnik into space, American scientists rallied to build the world's top space program.

Satellite composite showing location of Vostok within the Antarctic continent (NASA)

Two and a half miles beneath the surface of Antarctica’s central Eastern ice sheet is a body of water 160 miles by 30 miles across known as Lake Vostok , after the Vostok research station above it, built by the former Soviet Union in 1957 and now operated by Russia.

The thought of shuffling off our mortal coil can make all of us a little squeamish. But avoiding the idea of death entirely means ignoring the role it can play in determining our actions. Consider the following scenario:

By Carey Gillam

HALLSVILLE, Missouri (Reuters) - Dan Pugh wishes he had a bigger tractor and his wife Laura worries about their chickens in the winter weather. But as new farmers putting down roots in rural Missouri, the Pughs are counting on more rewards than regrets in trading their city lives for the country.

We don't hear too much about natural dust, the kind that the winds loft from deserts and dry lakebeds into the air and carries for hundreds of kilometers, crossing oceans and continents, but we should. Plumes of dust connect the atmosphere, the oceans and the forests, and affect the most fundamental processes of life on our planet. Scientists believe that dust has profound and somewhat mysterious influences on atmospheric chemistry, solar heat exchange and nutrient supply to the oceans and rain forests. What those influences are, exactly, is the subject of much study and is still somewhat mysterious--the story of dust shows just how complex our natural world is, and how difficult it is to understand it. For more, see our February feature story, 'Swept From Africa to the Amazon '.

The Bodele depression at the southern edge of the Sahara is a fearsome, forsaken place. Winds howl through the nearby Tebesti Mountains and Ennedi Plateau, picking up speed as they funnel into a parched wasteland nearly the size of California. Once there was a massive freshwater lake here. Now the lake is a shrunken puddle of its former self. Across most of the landscape, there is nothing.

Astronomers have discovered a trove of exoplanets --more than 700 worlds in orbit around distant stars, with leads on thousands of additional suspects. So now, naturally, they're beginning to ask: What moons might be in orbit about these planets?

This has been a big week in Alzheimer's news as scientists put together a clearer picture than ever before of how the disease affects the brain. Three recently published studies have detected the disease with new technologies, hinted at its prevalence, and described at last how it makes its lethal progress through the brain.

Starting a fire on the International Space Station might not sound like such a good idea.

Child using transcranial direct current stimulation

What if a drug could improve learning and cognition and had no untoward medical consequences? Wouldn t it be justified to make it widely available? A group of scientists concluded three years ago that it would be.

There are many different factors which go into whether animals (or humans) develop obesity and diabetes. Different sensitivity to different chemicals, in different areas of the body and brain, can cause major differences in feeding behavior, body weight, fat, and insulin sensitivity. And now we’ve learned that changes in one circuit of the hypothalamus could make a big difference in a certain kind of obesity in mice.

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By Rebekah Kebede

PERTH (Reuters) - Thousands of Australians were forced from their homes on Monday because of floods that have risen to record levels in some areas and killed one person, and authorities issued warnings for more than a dozen rivers in Queensland and New South Wales states.

By Chris Buckley

BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Monday barred its airlines from joining an EU scheme that could charge for carbon emissions from flights in and out of Europe, escalating a global trade row over the taxing of foreign carriers.

When plants engage in photosynthesis , sunlight breaks apart water and CO2 to release oxygen and build plant--and people--food. It's cheap and ubiquitous but not much use for powering a home.

Today's robots that fly, jump or roll around must refuel or recharge as does any gadget that runs out of energy. Tomorrow's new generation of self-sustaining robots might keep going nearly forever by grazing on dead insects, rotting plant matter or even human waste.

By night, I work as a technical research scientist, writer of papers and so on, but by day I walk the beaches of the world, looking for partially decomposed mystery carcasses and identifying them. Kidding: of course I don t, but you get the idea thanks in no small part to the Montauk Monster flap of 2008 , I ve become known as the guy who identifies weird carcasses. In fact, so many queries of this sort come in via email that I don t have time to blog about them anymore.

Name : Todd Callaway [More]

As you watch the Patriots and Giants smash into each other Sunday, consider this.

Slow-motion replays of deep passes have mesmerized fans of American football for decades. The impossibly long, steady arc of a well-thrown ball is a thing of beauty.  In contrast, players sometimes refer to wobbly passes as ugly ducks, although just why isn't entirely clear, since ducks fly pretty well.