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Among the first things you notice when you step into the corner office of Harvard University professor Joanna Aizenberg are the playthings. Behind her desk sit a sand dollar, an azure butterfly mounted in a box, a plastic stand with long fibers that erupt in color when a switch is pulled, and haphazard rows of toys. Especially numerous are the Rubik’s cubes--the classic three-by-three, of course, but also ones with four, five, six and even seven mini cubes along each edge.

Joanna Aizenberg's muse is the whole of the natural world. The Harvard University materials scientist takes her inspiration from creatures that suggest engineering of substances in unexpected ways.

Encroaching seas have eroded southeastern Louisiana.

I bought three copies of Sam Kean s The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements . I left the first one in the seat-back pocket of Delta flight 188 from Beijing to Detroit.

* Snowfalls expected to ease on Thursday evening * PM says priority is to rescue bus passengers [More]

Children living near DuPont’s plant in West Virginia are exposed to much higher concentrations of an industrial chemical than their mothers, according to a newly published study. [More]

By Nina Chestney LONDON, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Flooding will be Britain's biggest climate risk this century, with damage set to cost as much as 12 billion pounds ($18 billion) a year by the 2080s if nothing is done to adapt to extreme weather, a report said on Thursday. British summers are forecast to get hotter, while winters will get milder and wetter. New government-funded research has identified the top 100 effects of climate change and their expected impact on Britain and magnitude over this century.

When it comes to the battle of the bulge, putting on more muscle will burn extra calories even when you're resting. But recent research suggests that there might be a particular type of fat that also uses up more energy than the typical off-white stuff that tends to congregate around American midsections: brown fat

It’s known that taller people tend to have more jobs with more authority--and higher salaries.

Despite major oil finds off Brazil's coast, new fields in North Dakota and ongoing increases in the conversion of tar sands to oil in Canada , fresh supplies of petroleum are only just enough to offset the production decline from older fields. At best, the world is now living off an oil plateau--roughly 75 million barrels of oil produced each and every day--since at least 2005, according to a new comment published in Nature on January 26. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) That is a year earlier than estimated by the International Energy Agency--an energy cartel for oil consuming nations

Time and again humans have domesticated wild animals, producing tame individuals with softer appearances and more docile temperaments, such as dogs and guinea pigs. But a new study suggests that one of our primate cousins--the African ape known as the bonobo --did something similar without human involvement.

President Obama mentioned climate change almost in passing during last night's State of the Union address, noting: "The differences in this chamber may be too deep right now to pass a comprehensive plan to fight climate change." [More]

What is time? It begins, it ends, it s real, it s an illusion. It s the ultimate paradox.

On January 23 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that law enforcement authorities do not generally have a right to affix a GPS tracking device to a suspect's car without first obtaining a valid warrant.