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The brain usually has a pretty good idea of what is part of the body and what is not--although the classic rubber hand illusion can convince people to adopt a fake hand as their own when one of their real hands is hidden from view. Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have added a strange new twist to this experiment, persuading volunteers to believe that they have three hands rather than two. The psychologists accomplished this sensory legerdemain by placing a false rubber right hand next to the subject’s real right hand and covering both with a cloth from the wrist up (to obscure which one was connected to the body)

NASA's shuttle program, set to make its final flight later this week, has resulted in the death of 14 astronauts. But it could have been a lot worse.

Twitter hosts town hall meeting, App store hits 15 billion sold, Facebook fights back, and more. President Obama tweets

For years health officials have thrown money at ways to prevent young children from dying, with little global data on effectiveness. Recently a pattern has emerged: mortality drops in proportion to the years of schooling that women attain

(Adds governor's letter to company) By Emilie Ritter [More]

(Chirping sound.) That may not sound like much – but it’s the loudest animal in the world. For its size, that is. The insect called the water boatman is two millimeters long.

Claims about the positive effects of debt warrant a closer look

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine A controversial new study is questioning the oft-repeated connection between the consumption of too much salt and the development of cardiovascular disease.

Deep in the Silurian seas, some 420 million years ago, a strange structure had just emerged in the bodies of many new vertebrates. Some fish began developing a defined upper and lower jaw that allowed them to devour large and hard-shelled organisms

By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazine The most direct evidence yet for ancient photosynthesis has been uncovered in a fossil of a matted carpet of microbes that lived on a beach 3.3 billion years ago. Frances Westall at the Centre for Molecular Biophysics, a laboratory of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in Orleans and her colleagues looked at the well-preserved Josefsdal Chert microbial mat--a thin sheet formed by layer upon layer of tiny organisms--from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa. These layers of ancient microorganisms grew at a time when Earth's atmosphere did not contain oxygen

UNITED NATIONS -- The U.N. Security Council will debate climate change for the second time in four years, its current chair announced yesterday. The July 20 discussion, led by the German government, will be a repeat of a 2007 attempt by the United Kingdom to put climate change on the council's agenda

What does a bookworm have in common with a black-tufted marmoset? They both like a little quiet. Or so say scientists in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters

A pilot episode of It Ain't Rocket Science , an original, family-friendly television show that Time Warner Cable has created as part of its Connect a Million Minds venture, aired June 24 on NY1. The program shares information about STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) topics, aiming to cultivate a love of science in children through informational segments and interviews with experts--such as Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina. [More]

BOSTON – The world has seen seven global cholera outbreaks since 1817, and the current one seems to have come to stay. Rising temperatures and a stubbornly persistent, toxic bacteria strain appear to have given the disease the upper hand. Public health officials are working on vaccines, struggling to improve sanitation in impoverished nations and grasping for ways to predict the outbreaks