Science News

New operators of the desert greenhouse aim to save the planet Last month, after 18 years of government service, William Harris abandoned the no-nonsense National Science Foundation for the fringes of science: He took over as director of Biosphere 2....

Scientists are beginning to unravel fundamental features of commonsense knowledge about the natural world, with intriguing and ironic results. From rain forests in Guatemala to urban jungles and suburban parks in the United States, people construct...

Looking something like a tiny squashed eel, a newfound fossil from southwest China will not win any beauty contests. Yet this 530-million-year-old specimen from Earth's Cambrian period holds a special allure for paleontologists. It may be the oldest...

Normally a straight arrow, light usually doesn't turn a corner. Now, researchers have worked out a novel way to make a beam change direction. This trick isn't done with mirrors, the usual way to send light on a new path, but with a photonic crystal,...

Among the musical elite are those with perfect pitch, the ability to identify, play, or sing a specific musical note without hearing a reference note. Hit a random piano key, and such people can instantly tell whether it was a C-sharp or a B-flat. They...

The human Y chromosome is both a degenerate and a copycat. The first accusation is an old one. Scientists believe this male chromosome once had thousands of genes in common with the X chromosome, the other mammalian sex chromosome. Early in mammalian...

It took a while before the medical community paid attention. The first known cases of what the tabloids gleefully called virgin births appeared, amusingly enough, in Las Vegas. Then physicians across the United States began documenting similar events....