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By Edwin Cartlidge of Nature magazine This year's hunt for the Higgs boson is drawing to a close. [More]

Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, has won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe through observations of distant supernovae." Perlmutter heads the international Supernova Cosmology Project, which pioneered the methods used to discover the accelerating expansion of the universe, and he has been a leader in studies to determine the nature of dark energy.

In 1961 Stanley Milgram embarked on a research program that would change psychology forever. Fueled by a desire to understand how ordinary Germans had managed to participate in the horrors of the Holocaust, Milgram decided to investigate when and why people obey authority. To do so, he developed an ingenious experimental paradigm that revealed the surprising degree to which ordinary individuals are willing to inflict pain on others.

A fungus known as Geomyces destructans is indeed responsible for the dusting of white across bat noses and wings that has wiped out entire populations of the flying mammals, new research shows. By purposefully infecting healthy bats with the fungus--and confirming that seemingly healthy "control" bats from the same population did not get sick from a prior but hidden fungal infection--microbiologist David Blehert of the U.S.

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine A collection of teeth from dinosaurs in the western U.S. [More]

This year has been the worst in recent history for natural disasters in the U.S., with record-level floods, fires, and hurricanes.

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine After generating considerable attention with a preview on Capitol Hill last spring, an independent team of scientists has formally released their analysis of the land surface temperature record.

By Brian Switek of Nature magazine About 13,800 years ago, a mastodon in North America met a somewhat ironic end. [More]

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment. On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. [More]

In a series of experiments, Ryota Kanai, a researcher at UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, had college students between the ages of 19 and 28 state their Facebook network size, then scanned their brains by MRI.

The unification of quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity is one of the most exciting and still open questions in modern physics. General relativity, the joint theory of gravity, space and time gives predictions that become clearly evident on a cosmic scale of stars and galaxies.

By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Galileo, the largest program ever launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) will enter its latest phase with the launch of two navigation satellites on 20 October. [More]

By Sharon Weinberger of Nature magazine The Pentagon's forays into social science--what the military calls "human terrain"--have raised ethics concerns among academics. [More]

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine www.nature.com/news The world's leading candidate for a malaria vaccine has cleared another hoop on the way to widespread use, proponents say. [More]

The kick-off meeting for the second phase of the LAGUNA’s design study starts today at CERN. The principal goal of LAGUNA (Large Apparatus for Grand Unification and Neutrino Astrophysics) is to assess the feasibility of a new pan-European research infrastructure able to host the next generation, very large volume, deep underground neutrino observatory.