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The idea of drugs tunneling their way through the brain, worms to the mind’s apple, is a frequent metaphor I hear. I wrote on the topic for Discovery’s Curiosity and resurfaced it to prepare material for drug education talks with high schoolers.

As the climate shifts, many species will migrate to more favorable destinations, altering their natural range. However, researchers have found that the journey itself may be perilous and the path to a new habitat could fall apart, meaning some organisms may not make the transition to a new home. Scientists at Brown University studied 15 amphibian species in the Pacific Northwest, including the black-bellied slender salamander, the Santa Lucia Mountains slender salamander, the California red-legged frog and the California newt

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Summer monsoons that provide up to 80 percent of the water South Asia needs have gotten drier in the past half century, possibly due to aerosol particles spewed by burning fossil fuels, climate scientists said on Thursday. [More]

An industrial add-on to geothermal power plants near the Salton Sea in California could one day produce the lithium that is required for electric car batteries . Already, Simbol Materials , the company behind the process, has begun purifying lithium from conventional mining operations in Argentina, Chile and elsewhere for the global battery market at a demonstration facility in Brawley, Calif.

Recent exploration of rare volcanic rocks in the rugged, dangerous desert of southern Afghanistan has identified world-class concentrations of rare earth elements, the prized group of raw materials that are essential in the manufacture of many modern technologies, from electric cars to solar panels. So far, geologists say, they have mapped one million metric tons of these critical elements, which include lanthanum, cerium and neodymium

The top U.S. particle collider, now eclipsed by a more powerful European machine, will be switched off September 30 [More]

Image courtesy of Flickr/Ted Abbott In 2009 California took in $839 million in taxes from the sale of cigarettes. And with its--and many other states’--budget in dire straights, it is hard to turn down any extra income. [More]

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the July 1994 issue of Scientific American and describes the first tentative sighting of the top quark.

STRASBOURG, France (Reuters) - EU lawmakers recommended on Thursday including a call for global targets on renewable energy and energy efficiency in the European Union's negotiating position for next year's Rio+20 sustainability summit in June. "We should aim at globally binding targets," said Karl-Heinz Florenz, a member of the European Parliament who helped draft the resolution. [More]

Editor's note: This article was originally published in the September 1997 issue of Scientific American (a PDF version of the original is available for purchase below). We have resurfaced this article to commemorate the end of the Tevatron

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Europe's first exchange for trading wood pellets, used to replace coal in electricity generation, will be launched on November 3 in the port of Rotterdam, Anglo-Dutch exchange APX Endex said in a statement. The global market of wood pellets is growing as a result of world-wide policies to cut CO2 emissions and replace fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy.

(Reuters) - The American eel, a freshwater fish native to the eastern United States that is born and dies in the open ocean, may be at risk of extinction because of climate change, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said on Wednesday. The agency, which is considering a petition to add the eel to its official list of endangered species, said new scientific evidence, including "statistically significant long-term" declines in the stock of young eels, suggested the snake-like species is in enough peril to warrant federal protection.

By Nigel Hunt and Ikuko Kurahone LONDON (Reuters) - Major British independent oil firm Greenergy sees its future as an exploration company, but one that hunts for fuel in piles of stale pork pies and cakes rather than under the ground or from food crops. [More]

As a little girl, some of my fondest memories were watching science and nature shows on American public television with my family: NOVA, National Geographic, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. I recall as a preteen being transfixed as I watched an episode of NOVA that demonstrated a magnified image of cardiac muscle cells sparsely arranged

According to recent headlines, we might be poisoning ourselves and our kids with pain pills, yet we're afraid to tell doctors we're depressed. Anti-depressants are the second most prescribed kind of medication in the U.S., and an estimated one in 10 Americans reports suffering from depression . This class of drugs has become about as common as table salt in American households, yet enough stigma (and fear of side effects) still exists to make patients feel uncomfortable telling their doctors if they’re experiencing symptoms of depression