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After an echolocating bat locks on to an insect with its sonar beam, it can keep track of its prey despite receiving a slew of echoes from other objects--leaves, vines and so on. How does it separate echoes bouncing off its target from echoes bouncing off the surrounding clutter, especially when the echoes reach the bat at the same time?

By Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature magazine The US Treasury has warned that if the US debt ceiling, the amount that the country may legally borrow, is not raised by 2 August, the country will not legally be able to pay all its obligations. [More]

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Have a spare polar icebreaker lying around? The National Science Foundation would like to hear from you.

For a limited time, the full text of this article is being made available for fans of Scientific American's page on Facebook. Read it now or become a fan . [More]

By Tasim Zahid LONDON (Reuters) - British farmers are experimenting with crops such as olives and nectarines which have traditionally been imported from southern Europe while the first British tea plantation has opened with a changing climate set to transform the nation's countryside. [More]

By Karen Brooks AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - There are 1.5 million bats living under a bridge in downtown Austin, and a historic Texas drought is making them hungrier than ever. [More]

Again, our bloggers produced some amazing stuff today:

More than 60 mammal species--like the famous flying squirrel--have adapted the ability to sail from tree to tree. Thrilling, yes

Sixty-one-year-old Diana Nyad hopes to make history this summer by becoming the first person to swim 166 kilometers of shark-infested ocean between Cuba and the Florida Keys--without a shark cage. Nyad tried the crossing in 1978, swimming in a cage pulled by a boat. Tall waves, strong currents and bad weather kept her from succeeding.

Science Online London 2011 is the fourth annual meeting of people interested in the way the Web has transformed scientific research and communication.

Nobel Laureate Avram Hershko, who determined cellular mechanisms for breaking down proteins, talks about his research in a conversation recorded at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany. [More]

Ask someone where they are from and most likely they will tell you their hometown, perhaps even a specific neighborhood. Put the same question to physicist Brian Cox and you get an entirely different response--one that involves the recycling of atoms brought together from the far reaches of the universe. Cox likes to remind people that every atom of their body used to be part of something else, and will become part of something new in the end.

By Matt Kaplan of Nature magazine Analysis of fossil traits suggests that Archaeopteryx is not a bird at all. [More]

When he retired after 26 years as an investigator with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Office of the Inspector General, George Mulley thought his final report was one of his best. Mulley had spent months looking into why a pipe carrying cooling water at the Byron nuclear plant in Illinois had rusted so badly that it burst. His report cited lapses by a parade of NRC inspectors over six years and systemic weaknesses in the way the NRC monitors corrosion.