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Editor's note: In the August issue of Scientific American, cosmologist George Ellis describes why he's skeptical about the concept of parallel universes. Here, multiverse proponent multiverse proponents Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark offer counterpoints, explaining why the multiverse would account for so many features of our universe--and how it might be tested.

In the past decade an extraordinary claim has captivated cosmologists: that the expanding universe we see around us is not the only one; that billions of other universes are out there, too. There is not one universe--there is a multiverse.

HOUSTON -- NASA's last space shuttle ever to visit the International Space Station cast off from the orbiting lab early Tuesday (July 19) to begin one final trip back to Earth. Atlantis launched July 8 on the 135th and last voyage of NASA's 30-year space shuttle program

A decade after the fall of the soviet union in 1991, modernization is the watchword in Russia--with science as a vital means to that end. During the spring meeting of the 14 international editions of Scientific American , we gathered in Moscow, and our hosts introduced us to many of the surrounding issues. Scientific American has had a long history in this country, where it has been available in translation for 28 years

Autism, a developmental disorder that causes deficits in social behavior and communication, affects four times as many boys as girls.

Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. [More]

Everybody knows that the passage of time is not constant.

By Yoko Kubota TOKYO, July 19 (Reuters) - Japan's government said on [More]

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.

Thanks to Skype, Apple FaceTime and at least a half dozen other mobile video apps, the old-fashioned phone call is becoming pass

The current issue of Nature has a great feature about how mathematical inventions and discoveries often find unexpected applications, sometimes decades after their first appearance.

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Many people go offline over the weekend, and are busy catching up at work on Monday.

By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazine Babies who were exposed to certain organic pollutants in the womb are at a highly increased risk of neural tube defects leading to conditions such as spina bifida, according to researchers in China. Neural tube defects, in which the spinal cord, the brain or their coverings fail to develop completely, arise very early in pregnancy and affect more than 320,000 infants worldwide every year.

Nuclear fission powers the movement of Earth's continents and crust, a consortium of physicists and other scientists is now reporting, confirming long-standing thinking on this topic. Using neutrino detectors in Japan and Italy--the Kamioka Liquid-Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) and the Borexino Detector--the scientists arrived at their conclusion by measuring the flow of the antithesis of these neutral particles as they emanate from our planet. Their results are detailed July 17 in Nature Geoscience .