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Last year word broke of a computer virus that had managed to slip into Iran’s highly secure nuclear enrichment facilities. Most viruses multiply without prejudice, but the Stuxnet virus had a specific target in its sights--one that is not connected to the Internet. Stuxnet was planted on a USB stick that was handed to an unsuspecting technician, who plugged it into a computer at a secure facility

Cosmic neutrinos could yield key insights, but detection devices would need to be the size of a star or galaxy In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people. This feature aims to look at the impossible dreams, the seemingly intractable problems in science

Six months ago a paper appeared on the Science Express pre-publication site of the prestigious journal Science . It came from a group of NASA-funded researchers, accompanied by the full NASA publicity hoopla, but it was harshly criticized by other researchers, with almost all agreeing that it was so seriously flawed that it should never have been published

Mimicking the highly efficient power-generation process of photosynthesis, an artificial leaf could change how the world gets energy. And new developments at MIT mean it could happen in the next few years. Earlier this year, MIT professor Daniel Nocera made a discovery : By dipping a cobalt-and phosphate-coated artificial silicon leaf into a jar of water, he could effectively mimic photosynthesis and create power at an efficiency greater than today's solar panels

How Do You Repeat Experiments That Require Volunteers to Not Know What's Next?

Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in all of science; at the same time, it's one of the most challenging to comprehend and one about which a great deal of nonsense has been written.

Experiment Might Take Thousands of Volunteers and Decades of Effort In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people.

We know that at the heart of at least two ocean basins--the North Pacific and the North Atlantic--tiny plastic fragments the size of confetti or smaller are accumulating on the sea surface by the tens of thousands, the remnants of discarded grocery bags, cups, bottles and other waste. Last year a group of researchers publishing in the journal Science reported a mystery: during a 22-year survey of plastic accumulation in the western North Atlantic, the scientists saw no increase in the amount of plastic, despite a surge in annual global plastic production from about 75 million to 245 million metric tons over the same period. Where was it going

In a game of one-upmanship, a Chinese team of physicists has figured out how to entangle eight photons simultaneously and to observe them in action; the previous record was six. In a paper published in arXiv, the team from the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, describe how they were able to convert a single photon into two entangled photons, using a nonlinear crystal, and then how they repeated that process with one of the paired photons produced, while holding the other in place, producing another pair, and then did it repeatedly until they had eight photons all entangled together, all held in place and all observable for a period of time.

Do you come from a country that has, let’s say, a history of environmental disasters or conquests? Then your culture is probably “tight”--it has strong social norms and doesn’t tolerate much deviance from those norms.

Robots that walk, robots that talk, robots that suck and, yes, robots that blow. We've got them all in this week's roundup: (Okay, we lied about the robots that talk bit...but some of them do, you know?) Loch, Singapore's Android Singapore's Nanyang Technological University has been working on its nation's most complex full-scale android yet--Loch, the Low Cost Humanoid--for a few years, but he's been largely overlooked. This is a shame, because though he's from a nation you wouldn't normally associate with advanced robotics, he can walk, manage stairs, and resist being pushed off course.

Editor's note: This editorial was written and published in 1911. Although our editors of a century ago pondered some lofty aspirations for the orderly future of humans, it was only three decades later that the brutal reality of a Nazi social order suffused with a eugenicist ideal brought home the practical shortcomings of the philosophy. The Science of Breeding Better Men [More]

Women may have a more subtle way of telling men “no” than anyone imagined. Chemical cues in their tears signal that they are not interested in romantic ac

Giant swirling masses of seawater known as mesoscale eddies roam the world's oceans. Whipped up by surface winds and girded by the Coriolis effect (produced by Earth's rotation), eddies may grow to several hundred kilometers in diameter and are known to transport heat, chemicals and biology throughout the oceans' shallower depths. A new study published April 29 in Science suggests that eddies may have a deeper reach than previously thought, helping to shape some of the most remote ecosystems on Earth--deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

In the previous blog entry my colleague Jim Haw gave the rationale for our work on Guam. After a week on Guam we will make the two-hour flight to Palau. The highest level of species biodiversity occurs in the Indo-West Pacific region, with nearly 2 percent of the world’s reefs distributed throughout Micronesia