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One of the most anticipated shuttle launches of all time took place July 8 when Atlantis lifted off at 11:29 A.M.

Polar bears' "mitochondrial Eve," the female from whom all of today's polar bears are descended, was not a polar bear at all. [More]

Cameras were once big and bulky.

The likelihood that a baby born in the U.S. will die within its first year is less than a third of what it was 50 years ago

For decades, policy makers have tried and failed to get Americans to eat less salt. In April 2010 the Institute of Medicine urged the U.S.

Earlier this year a 22-year-old college dropout, Jared Lee Loughner, shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords through the head near a Tucson supermarket, causing significant damage to Giffords’s brain. In the same shooting spree, Loughner killed or wounded 18 others, including a federal judge and a nine-year-old girl. Information from Loughner’s postings on YouTube and elsewhere online suggests that he is severely mentally ill.

By Jon Cartwright of Nature magazine Sound, like light, can be tricky to manipulate on small scales.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER-- Atlantis lifted off Friday at 11:29 A.M. Eastern time after a last-moment hold at 31 seconds on its 33rd and final mission--both for it and NASA's 30-year-old manned space shuttle program, putting on hiatus the era of human access to low Earth orbit on board U.S. spacecraft.

Dear EarthTalk : So many chemicals in everyday products are harmful to our health and the environment.

The United States is on the verge of losing its ability to monitor phytoplankton activity in the world's oceans from space, the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday. The loss of satellite-based "ocean color" measurements would be a blow to climate science, because phytoplankton -- tiny ocean plants -- help regulate the global carbon cycle. Like plants on land, phytoplankton produce energy by photosynthesis, pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to fuel the process

CAPE CANAVERAL -- I took this picture last night, and I don’t like it very much. [More]

FOOD FOR THOUGHT In the article on physical ailments influencing the brain, “ Ruled by the Body ,” Erich Kasten listed a number of medical conditions that can masquerade as mental disorders. To that list, I would add celiac disease, in which an intolerance to the gluten found in wheat and other grains causes an autoimmune reaction in the gut that prevents the absorption of crucial vitamins and minerals. The resulting malnutrition can cause fatigue, muddled thinking, anxiety and depression, along with many digestive symptoms

Research published in Nature Materials this month takes lessons from cooperation in nature, including that observed in insect swarms, to create better targeting methods for cancer therapeutics [1]. "Smart" anti-cancer drug systems can use mechanisms similar to swarm intelligence to locate sites of disease in the human body.

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER--4:14 A.M.

Atlantis Launch Notes: July 7, 6:00 P.M.