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DNA from a mass grave found in Athens in the mid-1990s helped experts identify typhoid fever as a possible source of the plague that killed off one quarter of the city’s population in the fifth century

Name: Jean Schneider Title:

Mangroves are tangled orchards of spindly shrubs that thrive in the interface between land and sea. They bloom in muddy soil where the water is briny and shallow, and the air muggy

The Lemelson–M.I.T. Program recognized four student inventors Wednesday poised to make a profound impact in the areas of disease diagnostics, drug development, assistive devices such as wheelchairs, and security screening for explosives

By Marian Turner Attaching chemotherapy drugs to small particles called nanodiamonds can make the drugs more effective, according to a study published this week in Science Translational Medicine . Anticancer drugs tend to become ineffective because cancer cells quickly pump them out before they have had time to do their work.

By Zo

Dear EarthTalk : I understand that Congress passed legislation not too long ago that protected a few million acres of wilderness areas, parks and wild rivers, in part to help offset climate change. How does conserving land prevent global warming?-- M. Oakes, Charlottesville, N.C

Dear EarthTalk : I understand that Congress passed legislation not too long ago that protected a few million acres of wilderness areas, parks and wild rivers, in part to help offset climate change.

Atheists The best thing about writing a story as a journalist is that you get to interact with astute readers who are never reticient about telling you what you missed in your reporting. My story, “ The Neuroscience of True Grit ,” the cover in the current issue, talks about what we know, and what we’re still trying to find out, about psychological resilience: the thing that

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The 2010 Russian heat wave that killed thousands and cut into that country's grain harvest was primarily due to natural variability, not human-spurred climate change, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday. [More]

Nuclear power is evil. Solar power is our savior. Or…is it the other way around

Ice loss from the massive ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica is accelerating, according to a new study. If the trend continues, ice sheets could become the dominant contributor to sea level rise sooner than scientists had predicted, concludes the research, which will be published this month in the journal Geophysical Research Letters

Nuclear power is evil. Solar power is our savior.

In the March issue of Scientific American Carl Schoonover, author of Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century , describes a new computer-modeling technique that allows researchers to zoom in on the smallest components of the active brain in 3-D. To accompany the story, we've collected images from his recent book , which describes the tools that scientists have used to observe the nervous system from the second century to the present.

If you could pause time for an instant and make yourself small enough to discern individual molecules, the far right of this image is what you might see when one brain cell communicates with another across a synapse--the point of contact between two nerve cells. How the brain senses, thinks, learns and emotes depends on how all its nerve cells, or neurons, communicate with one another. And as a result, many laboratories are working feverishly to understand how synapses function--and how psychiatric drugs, which target them, improve patients’ lives