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By David Alire Garcia LA VENTOSA, Mexico (Reuters) - On an arid plain where sudden gusts of wind can rip roofs off buildings and knock over tractor trailers, Mexico is building a new engine for its energy future. Surrounded by towering turbines in every direction, the town of La Ventosa - which means "the windy place" in Spanish - is at the heart of a wind power boom in the country. Mexico, the world's 14th biggest economy, still punches well below its weight in terms of wind energy, ranking 24th on the planet in installed capacity last year, according to the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC).

There’s more to your DNA than your DNA. We are now becoming aware of the epigenome. While DNA controls you, your epigenome may help control your DNA, or rather, it can have an extensive impact on how your DNA is expressed.

The changing hues of a peacock’s splendid tail feathers have always captivated curious minds. Seventeenth-century English scientist Robert Hooke called them “fantastical,” in part because wetting the feathers caused the colors to disappear

Some of the most brilliant colors found on butterflies, birds and squid are produced by nanostructures on wings, feathers and skin that reflect light. The effects can become even more varied when these “structural” colors are combined with filters made from light-absorbing pigments. For example, the characteristic green plumage of parrots seems to be produced by yellow pigment over a blue reflective nanosurface

When you don't clean your plate, microbes feast.

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Americans get a stream of messages telling them to avoid vaccines, from Jenny McCarthy on Oprah to billboard animations shown in Times Square.

Phototropism, photo by Tangopaso Wie orientieren sich Cyanobakterien im Licht [More]

I remember my retirement like it was yesterday. As I recall, I am still working, though not as hard as I did when I was younger

Working at Scientific American , known for its spiffy technical illustrations, I always look for material that can show what an article is trying to tell.

I’ve written before about ancient diseases of the ice age , but this time I’m going even further back in time, to diseases that were present in the first human-like hominids. Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domistication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty diseases.

Orangutans at the Jungle Island Zoo in Florida are learning to use IPads to identify object like body parts and food. The hi-tech approach to communication is modelled on a system used successfully with autistic children.

One family generally dines on Chinese takeout while their neighbors eat home-cooked meatloaf. You say potato, I say potahto. And humans aren’t the only primate species with cultural differences: even in the same environment, different groups of chimpanzees use different tools

It is probably no surprise to my regular readers that I get a little exercised about the science wars that play out across the U.S. in various school boards and court actions. It’s probably unavoidable, given that I think about science for a living — when you’ve got a horse in the race, you end up spending a lot of time at the track