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In his book Predictably Irrational , Dan Ariely notes that from about 1978 to 1993, the average pay for a public company CEO climbed from 36 times the average worker’s pay to 131 times. In order to “shame” companies into holding back on lavish pay for CEOs, the Securities and Exchange Commission began requiring publicly held firms to disclose the pay of their top five executives in their financial reports. The result?

DURBAN, South Africa I rented a cellphone during my sojourn here to cover the recent climate change negotiations . A local number enabled me to keep in touch with home and office but also, perhaps more importantly, to make appointments on the fly with ever harried international negotiators

What if you had to change your company name and URL and hope your customers would find you again?

As the recent flurry of articles about why portable electronic devices are restricted during air travel makes clear, the conclusion to be drawn from the information available is a very complicated: “We just don’t know.” For this reason alone airlines err on the side of caution, asking people nicely (and sometimes not so nicely) to turn off their gadgets during takeoff and landing.

Image of organism fossil, once throught to be an ancient animal embryo; courtesy of Swedish Museum of Natural History The proverbial primordial soup from which our earliest, multi-cellular ancestors emerged was presumably seething with many much simpler, single-celled organisms. Finding the first indications of evolution into more advanced, embryonic development has proved difficult, however, both because of the organisms’ small size and soft structures

By Scott DiSavino (Reuters) - U.S. regulators moved a step closer on Thursday toward clearing the country's first nuclear reactors since the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, even as the industry struggles against plunging natural gas prices and safety fears after Japan's Fukushima disaster.

Is it really true that all press is good press? Here's a look at 10 of the year's craziest PR stunts. Done well, publicity stunts can generate huge positive buzz for you and your company

XMRV image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention A recent research paper that linked a retrovirus to chronic fatigue syndrome was fully retracted Thursday, following more than a year of growing doubts and incremental backpeddling by researchers and journals alike

In a 2008, for a few moments, Republicans and Democrats came together in support of action to mitigate the impacts of climate change. In an ad sponsored by former Vice President Al Gore’s group, Alliance for Climate Protection , Former Speakers of the House Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich sat down together and voiced their agreement that the “country must take action to address climate change.” Pelosi went further, saying that the country needs “cleaner forms of energy.. fast.” [More]

This year was quite an eventful one in spaceflight, with many vessels launching toward the heavens -- and a few crashing back to Earth . [More]

Inevitably, year-end lists invite plenty of debate and criticism, and Scientific American 's is no exception. Certainly, we could have included the discovery of new worlds beyond our solar system, including Kepler 22 b, an exoplanet in the "Goldilocks" zone of habitability, as well as the first known Earth-size exoplanets .

It’s better than an ant farm. It’s more exciting than a flea circus

Key concepts [More]

In South Africa they have a problem, a big one: too many elephants. [More]

By Zoe Corbyn A common assumption is that rising global temperatures will increase the spread of malaria -- the deadly mosquito-borne disease that affects millions of people worldwide. [More]