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By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine Ahead of a key international meeting on tuna catches, an assessment is painting a bleak picture of the conservation status of some of the world's most commercially valuable fish species. Bruce Collette, who studies ocean fish at the National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory in Washington DC, and his colleagues conducted the first global assessment of the scrombids and billfish, groups of fish that include some of the species with the highest value as seafood, such as tuna and marlin, as well as staples such as mackerel.

As NASA prepares to wrap up its shuttle program , leaving open questions about what comes next for U.S. human spaceflight, the next big thing in NASA's astronomy program has been dealt a blow

Editor's Note: William Gilly , a professor of biology at Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, embarked on new expedition this month to study jumbo squid in the Gulf of California on the National Science Foundation–funded research vessel New Horizon . This is his seventh blog post about the trip. [More]

There is a certain sense of unreality as I sit this morning at the Kennedy Space Center press site, with Atlantis on the launch pad just over three miles away awaiting its last mission (STS 135), NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver finishing a briefing on NASA's ambitious plans for the future, a hundred enthusiastic young people from all over the country gathered for a "Tweetup" to communicate their impressions of being at a launch--while in Washington, D.C., the House Appropriations Committee apparently is intending today to cut almost $2 billion from NASA's budget. There is a remarkable disconnect between the excitement surrounding the last shuttle launch, set to lift-off Friday, and the pervasive and merited anxiety about NASA's future that is almost the first thing out of the mouths of any of the space veterans I have encountered in the past 24 hours. I commented to a reporter earlier today that the current level of uncertainty about the future of the NASA program is the greatest that I have seen in 45 years of close observation of the U.S.

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The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics raised the profile of graphene --a super strong one-atom thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern with countless potential commercial applications.

By Richard A. [More]

Citizen scientists can spend some of those long, lazy summer nights helping researchers study diminishing firefly populations [More]

Dust on earthly objects is often an indicator of antiquity. But that is not always the case for cosmic objects, some of which have quite a bit of dust despite their relative youth

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine Piracy is stopping oceanographers and meteorologists from collecting data vital to understanding the Indian monsoon and rainfall patterns in the United States, researchers say. Pirate activity off the coast of Somalia has skyrocketed in recent years. [More]

Atlantis Launch Notes: July 7, 9:00 A.M. KENNEDY SPACE CENTER--As of now, NASA's final space shuttle launch is still on for Friday at 11:26 A.M. Eastern time, but a gathering storm bearing down on Florida's Space Coast remains a major concern.

The search for beauty has spurred great works of art and music, lengthy philosophical treatises and decades of dense cultural criticism. So, is beauty in the object ?

Long, white vapor trails blending into cirrus clouds and cooling over southeastern England during World War II have led researchers to believe that contrails could influence climate.

NEW YORK – Even by this city's standards, the Garment District is an imposing place to ride a bike. A never-ending parade of delivery trucks rumbles along 8th Avenue between 34th and 42nd streets, leaving a wake of gritty exhaust for cyclists to feel, smell and breathe

The critically endangered wild Bactrian camel ( Camelus ferus ) is so rare and lives in such remote areas that it was only recognized (after a few years of scientific debate) as its own species in 2008, decades after China started using one of its few habitats, the the Lop Nur Desert, to test nuclear bombs. Amazingly, this two-humped camel appears to be no worse for wear following the tests, but now more humans are entering those once-remote areas. With hunting, mineral mining and other threats on the rise, the camel's numbers have dropped 50 percent in the past 25 years to just 1,000 animals in two distinct populations.