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When Richard Garriott blasted into orbit three years ago , following in the footsteps of his astronaut father, he didn't go empty-handed. He brought with him 20 paintings and photographs to put on temporary display within the cramped confines of the International Space Station (ISS).

Inspiration often seems to pop up unpredictably--in the shower, on a long walk or even at the grocery store. But one place I never expect it is during sleep. I tend to think of myself as a computer: at bedtime I power myself down with teeth brushing and pillow fluffing, and soon enough my brain switches off.

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

As a professor at M.I.T., Ely Sachs was a strong supporter of alternative energy research. How strong?

Beverly Martinez was sitting at her desk in the office of a California scrap metal recycling plant when she felt the blast rattle her window. One of her co-workers, Leonardo Morales Zavala, rushed through her door, struggling to breathe.

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]

Key concepts Plants [More]

In the 1990s I had the opportunity to dine with the late musician Isaac Hayes, whose career fortunes had just made a stunning turnabout upward, which he attributed to Scientology. It was a glowing testimonial by a sincere follower of the Church, but is it evidence that Scientology works? Two recently published books argue that there is no science in Scientology, only quasireligious doctrines wrapped in New Age flapdoodle masquerading as science.

The ground shook violently in L'Aquila, Italy, early in the morning of April 6, 2009, more violently than it had during the tremors the area had been experiencing for months. After the dust settled and the recovery effort was over, 308 people were dead. Now the local prosecutor is charging the scientific committee responsible for predicting earthquakes with failing to give the people of L'Aquila adequate warning.

Since the space age began, the orbital realm has become increasingly littered with the detritus of skyward human striving--spent rocket boosters, dead satellites, stray pieces of hardware. Debris is piling up with such speed that it has become a threat to the kind of spacefaring endeavors that spawned it in the first place. A September report by the National Research Council found that the debris field is so dense that collisions between objects in orbit will create additional debris faster than space junk falls out of orbit.

CANBERRA (Reuters) - A team from Japan won a world solar car race through Australia's outback on Thursday, after battling more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) of remote highways, dodging kangaroos and other wildlife and avoiding a bushfire. Race officials said the team from Tokai University, near Tokyo, finished the race from the northern city of Darwin to the southern city of Adelaide at about noon on Thursday. [More]

By Nina Chestney LONDON (Reuters) - The challenges of human migration due to climate change have been underestimated as millions of people will either move into or be trapped in areas of risk by 2060, rather than migrating away, a British government report showed on Thursday. [More]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--What does it take to pick a winner in the slowly unfolding field of renewable energy ? For starters, alternatives to oil must be able to stand up on their own at some point, without a need for permanent government subsidies, said Bill Joy, once a heavy hitter in the information technology industry and now a partner in investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s greentech practice.

* Partners in Health to start vaccinating in January * Move follows months of debate over vaccine option [More]

Humans have mostly abandoned the grooming strategies of our chimp cousins. So there's a good chance your scalp and the back of your head go largely unexamined. But this inattention can leave skin cancers undetected