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* Battle to control Fukushima plant seen far from over * Japan crisis helps tip Germany poll against Merkel [More]

Sex is a big deal. It can change how people see their partner. . Or themselves.

How did life start on Earth? Science still has no definitive answer

While there may be many interpretations of what a smut machine is or does, the one I’ll be talking about is the invention featured in the April 2, 1859 issue of Scientific American .

DALLAS--It can't happen here. Or can it?

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the new book Demand Better! Revive Our Broken Health Care System (Second River Healthcare Press, March 2011) by Sanjaya Kumar, chief medical officer at Quantros, and David B. Nash, dean of the Jefferson School of Population Health at Thomas Jefferson University. In the following chapter they explore the striking dearth of data and persistent uncertainty that clinicians often face when having to make decisions

The nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station in Japan that were crippled by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami are a lot like reactors in the U.S. They are a common, if not exactly modern, General Electric design that harnesses nuclear fission to boil water and drive steam turbines to generate electricity.

Posted for Jen Christiansen, Art Director, Information Graphics I'm in Pamplona, Spain, sitting at a table strewn with looseleaf paper, scissors and tubes of paste. My table is host to a German, a Swede, two Norwegians and a American

On December 1, 1969, Jersey Central Power & Light initiated fission in the fuel rods of the nation's first boiling-water nuclear reactor--one of 31 ultimately built in the U.S. The first "turnkey" plant, Oyster Creek nuclear generating station in New Jersey was sold for less than $100 million in 1964--a price well below what it would ultimately cost to build the reactor. The point was to prove that a nuclear power facility could be built as cheaply as a coal-fired power plant, and the key to that was a smaller safety system

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the April 1861 issue of Scientific American.

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. Penguin Press, 2011 [More]

APRIL 1961 Tiling [More]

It’s been more than a decade since the human genome was published.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Conventional lenses can resolve structures around 200 nanometers (nm) in size, but scientists in Europe have for the first time developed a lens capable of achieving optical resolution of under 100 nm at visible wavelengths.

We see it all the time on shows like Bones and CSI. Skeletal remains can yield all sorts of clues--gender, age, past physical traumas