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A federal government shutdown would cut short a key NASA field campaign to monitor Arctic ice. For the past three weeks, NASA researchers and crew have been surveying Arctic land and sea ice using specially equipped aircraft. The work is part of a larger project, "Operation IceBridge," designed to fill a gap between NASA's now-defunct ICESat satellite and its replacement, which isn't scheduled to launch until 2016.

By Philip Ball The idea that neglected environments encourage crime and antisocial behavior has been around since the 1980s. [More]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Many fastest-growing cities, especially those in the developing world, stand to suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change, a new study reported on Thursday. Few urban areas are taking the necessary steps to protect their residents -- billions of people around the globe -- from such likely events as heat waves and rising seas, according to research to appear in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability and European Planning Studies.

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Aftershocks--larger than any quake to hit the mainland U.S. in years--continue to rattle a beleaguered Japan.

The latest chapter in the legal battle over gene patenting unfolded this week during oral arguments (MP3) made in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. A year after a somewhat surprising victory in a New York federal district court, a group of plaintiffs led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) now hopes the U.S.

Start-ups and small businesses are always looking for ways to sell what they have more effectively. SalesSpider CEO Russell Rothstein knows this, and created a small business social network for early stage and growth companies. SalesSpider is the largest networks of its kind, with over 750,000 members, and a growth rate of 20 to 30,000 users a month

Today is January 28, and Lenina has a smashing headache; she is a Streptococcus pneumoniae researcher. Not that this was the main reason for the headache, but an important meeting was being held today to launch the Pneumococcal Molecular Epidemiology Network’s [PMEN] new paper in Science . Oddly enough, her role at the meeting is to summarize the history of Streptococcus pneumoniae prior to her group’s latest bit of information

Like most of us, NASA astronauts have to wake up and get to work--even when they're in space. So NASA is running a contest to select two new wake-up songs for the STS-134 shuttle crew when it's at the International Space Station.

The Fast Company reader's essential source for breaking news and innovation from around the web--updated all day. Google Secretly Making Chrome for Tablets Stealth elements in Chrome's source code reveal new features that are unmistakably designed for a tablet. Google acknowledged, "We are engaging in early open-source work for the tablet form factor, but we have nothing new to announce at this time." Cocoon, A Worry-Free Browser Cocoon aims for private, malware-free browsing by routing all Internet activity through a separate server that scrubs viruses and tracking software before such data reaches the user

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Yoko Nishikawa TOKYO, April 8 (Reuters) - A strong earthquake of magnitude [More]

Physicists sifting through data generated by the Tevatron particle collider in Illinois have uncovered a signal that neither they nor the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics can explain. [More]

Doctors routinely urge their patients to quit smoking and exercise regularly. But what if there were a blood test that could show smokers and couch potatoes the damage their lifestyle was actually wreak

1. Darling of the social media scene Twitter just revealed some stats for its recent performance, and they're pretty eye-popping: Over the first quarter of 2011 Twitter's tweet-per-day count grew 41% globally, and 38% in the U.S. Meanwhile from December to March there was a 52% increase in monthly sign-ups, and 155 million tweets per day are going on, up from 55 million at the same time last year.

Winter blues, spring fever--most of us take seasonal changes in mood for granted. According to a new study, the cause might be the seasons tinkering with the chemicals in our brain. As reported in the November 3 Journal of Neuroscience , researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health found evidence of seasonal differences in dopamine--a chemical messenger involved in motivation, pleasure, movement and learning.