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By Marian Turner of Nature magazine Bats use tiny hairs to sense the speed and direction of air flowing over their wings.

You’re lying in a hammock by a breezy shore. The hammock rocks softly back and forth.

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 third blog post about the trip

I admit, the only time I even notice beauty pageants is when one of the contestants flubs a response and video of the embarrassing moment makes the YouTube rounds.

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A major offshore Arctic oil spill could severely challenge the Coast Guard, with no available infrastructure to base rescue and clean-up operations, the Coast Guard commandant said on Monday.

By Sylvia Westall and Fredrik Dahl [More]

Nuclear energy has gotten a bad rap lately due to the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi reactor. Environment editor David Biello reveals that hydropower may be a greater threat. A joint project with Detroit Public Television

By James Vicini [More]

Domain name registries and marketers can rejoice now that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given its blessing to a plan encouraging the use of much more creative Web addresses. On Monday ICANN's Board of Directors voted to increase the number of Internet domain-name endings--called generic top-level domains (gTLDs)--from the seemingly ubiquitous .com, .net, .org and 19 other suffixes that most Web users have come to know over the past two decades

As the U.S. and China endure record-breaking floods this spring, there is a risk that is being overlooked amidst the inundated towns, evacuations and rising waters.

NORMAN, Okla.-- Evolution might not sound like it would be of much use to species whose small numbers have already placed them on the endangered or threatened list. But its lessons are being applied with next-generation genetic sequencing speed to solve some of today's pressing conservation questions. [More]

HAMBURG, Germany -- Twenty-five years after Gerhard Knies conceived of powering Europe with the Sahara Desert's sun, the North Africa Solar project has grown into something considerably more than a mere mirage, but it's still less than a reality. Part of the plan is to erect a network of solar plants that generate electricity by concentrating the heat from sunlight to make electricity, generating 100 gigawatts or the equivalent of 100 large nuclear power plants

Here's one advantage to armadillos' steady northward march across the Southeast United States: They're awfully handy to have as bait if, say, you're a wildlife biologist looking to trap an alligator that has inexplicably settled into your local pond in north Georgia. [More]

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Beatriz, the second named storm of the Pacific hurricane season, should become a hurricane later on Monday as it heads toward Mexican tourist beaches, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Computers now control even the largest pieces of industrial machinery, making critical infrastructure vulnerable to electronic attack.