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By Yoko Kubota and Kiyoshi Takenaka TOKYO, April 11 (Reuters) - Japanese nuclear power plant [More]

Spring is in the air. And so is pollen. Local plants put forth an abundance of the stuff in a bid to ensure their continued existence, even in the hardest concrete jungles.

[ Yawn sound. ] Oh sorry. Well, now that I’ve yawned, you might be yawning too.

April 9 (Reuters) - The following lists the impact of theearthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan on March 11 and [More]

* Beijing to closely monitor Japan's nuclear actions * China bans imports of farm products from 12 areas [More]

Is there such a thing as a spiritual fact? Finding? Discovery?

One of the more predictable outcomes of a government shutdown --in fact, the hyperbolic chatter alone regarding the uncertainties of such a major disruption is enough to do the trick--is that there will be a noticeable surge in the nation’s religious beliefs. According to Duke University psychologist Aaron Kay and his colleagues, God and government are more than just two sides of the same US-issued coin. In fact, they share a common cognitive denominator.

Pop quiz: True or false? [More]

It’s one of the great frustrations of obstetric medicine: humans have been reproducing for hundreds of thousands of years, and yet doctors still haven't unraveled the mystery of why some women give birth well before their babies have fully developed in the womb. Despite researchers' and physicians' best efforts, the rate of preterm births--defined as babies born before 37 weeks of gestation--climbed 30 percent from 1981 through 2006.

Some 300 exabytes (3

Venus is Earth's closest sibling, in terms of size and proximity, but it remains relatively little explored compared with Earth's other planetary neighbor, Mars. For instance, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) currently have three working Mars orbiters and one active Mars rover between them, whereas at Venus, ESA's Venus Express spacecraft has the place to itself

Urgent efforts to avert a government shutdown at midnight faltered yesterday over Republican initiatives to freeze climate rules, a challenge to the president's environmental priorities at the outset of his re-election bid. Controversial policy provisions meant to defund U.S

One of the successes of the ΛCDM model of the universe is the ability for models to create structures of with scales and distributions similar to those we view in the universe today.

On April 8, 1911, at the Leiden Cryogenic Laboratory in the Netherlands, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes and his collaborators immersed a mercury capillary in liquid helium and saw the mercury's electrical resistance drop to nothing once the temperature reached about 3 kelvins, or 3 degrees above absolute zero (around –270 Celsius). This phenomenon of "superconductivity" was one of the first quantum phenomena to be discovered, although back then quantum theory did not exist. In subsequent decades theoreticians were able to put quantum physics on a solid foundation and explain superconductivity.

Dear EarthTalk : Were Japan to close all its nuclear plants following the recent damage and radiation leaks from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, what would its energy mix look like?