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By peering into the distance with the biggest and best telescopes in the world, astronomers have managed to glimpse exploding stars, galaxies and other glowing cosmic beacons as they appeared just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.--Last night I witnessed the aftermath of the brief, angry riot at Penn State: an overturned news van being righted by a bulldozer, debris from battered cars and upended trash cans littering the street, college kids in “Joe Knows Football” t-shirts stumbling away from College Avenue with pepper sprayed red eyes and tear-stained faces, courtesy of the police. The students had reacted violently to the 10 p.m

The price of gold affects more than global finances; it also drives the world's most toxic pollution problem, according to new research from the Blacksmith Institute , an environmental health group based in New York City. Miners in countries from across Africa and Southeast Asia use mercury to separate the precious metal from the surrounding rock and silt

The East Coast of the United States isn't the first place that comes to mind as being at risk of tsunamis , but new sonar maps are now helping to show that these risks do exist. For about the past five years, researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, along with other governmental and academic partners, have been gauging the potential for tsunamis generated by landslides in submarine canyons in the mid-Atlantic to strike the U.S.

What do you do when a species is rapidly disappearing in the wild and two of its most likely in-captivity studs decide to cuddle with each other instead of with eligible bachelorettes? That’s the problem Toronto Zoo is encountering this week as two endangered male African penguins ( Spheniscus demersus ) recently brought to the zoo for breeding purposes seem more concerned with spending time with one another than with two eager females. [More]

As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residents have long complained that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution. A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency. [More]

By Omer Berberoglu and Jonathon Burch VAN, Turkey, Nov 10 (Reuters) - Trapped under the [More]

By Arshad Mohammed and Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will study a new route for the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, U.S. officials said on Thursday, delaying any final approval beyond the 2012 election and sparing President Barack Obama a politically risky decision for now. [More]

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazine It has been a medical mystery for 67 years, ever since the British geneticist Anthony Allison established that carriers of one mutated copy of the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia are protected from malaria. [More]

This is an exciting day for the #SciAmBlogs network – launch of the brand new blog by Katherine Harmon! She is a reporter and associate editor for Scientific American covering health, medicine, neuroscience and general life sciences for the website and you are probably familiar with her articles and blog posts (on the Observations blog). You can also follow her on Twitter at @katherineharmon . Katherine’s new blog is Octopus Chronicles , where she will write about this most intelligent and most charismatic of all invertebrates – the science, the history, the art, the works… This blog will be her “writing laboratory” as she works on her new book about these fascinating animals.

The world could burn nearly 8,000 million metric tons of coal by 2035 -- most of it in China -- unless countries radically change their energy policies, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA's World Energy Outlook released this week found that China almost singlehandedly fueled the rise in coal use throughout the first decade of the 21st century

Escolar masquerading as white tuna. Flounder passing for Vietnamese catfish

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Bees thrum among bright red blossoms on a spring day on Mount Diablo, near San Francisco Bay.