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With thousands of Emperor penguins ( Aptenodytes forsteri ) huddled close together for warmth on the ice sheets of Antarctica , there seems bound to be some competition for a toasty spot near the middle.

By Ewen Callaway of Nature magazine Fossilized teeth of early human ancestors bear signs that females left their families when they came of age, whereas males stayed close to home. A chemical analysis of australopithecine fossils ranging between roughly 1.8 million and 2.2 million years old from two South African caves finds that teeth thought to belong to females are more likely to have incorporated minerals from a distant region during formation than those from males

Internet video will comprise more than half of all Internet traffic, wireless devices will become the predominant way to surf the Web and there will be more networked devices than people on this planet within the next few years.

Deep in South Africa's gold mines water can be found in rock fractures, hosting bacteria that off the stone itself and form biofilms on the hard surfaces. Now new samples pulled from these sunless pools show that nematodes--roundworms of varying size that are essentially tubes with a digestive tract and thrive everywhere on the planet--likely graze on these bacterial films, surviving more than a kilometer underground.

Meatloaf, mac-and-cheese or a big bowl of mashed potatoes. We all have our comfort foods.

Quantum mechanics is the most successful description of nature known to humans, yet it has many bizarre implications for our understanding of the world. There are phenomena of superposition (objects being in two places at the same time), entanglement (correlations that exceed any classical correlations) and nonlocality (apparent ability for information to travel instantaneously across vast distances)

Editor's note (6/1/2011): We are making the text of this July 1985 article freely available for 30 days to coincide with the publication of a paper on entropy and quantum systems by Vlatko Vedral. He authored our June 2011 cover story and blogs about his latest work , which discusses the research featured in this 1985 article. A computation, whether it is performed by electronic machinery, on an abacus or in a biological system such as the brain, is a physical process

People who suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome were dealt another blow this week when it became clear that researchers still fail to understand the genesis of this disease. Perhaps most importantly, these patients are being advised to stop taking antiretroviral medications.

HANGZHOU, China -- In one of this nation's most popular tourist cities, famed for the beauty of its surrounding mountains, willow trees, lotus blossoms and ancient stone-arch bridges, a new sightseeing attraction is making its debut: the local landfill. With its so-called "trash tour," the landfill has attracted more than 10,000 visitors since it launched last year. There, tourists visit its trash-to-gas power plant, play environmental video games and hike in an eco-park the size of 10 football fields

May 31, 2011, was a bad day for a society already wary of all sorts of risks from modern technology, a day of celebration for those who champion more concern about those risks, and a day that teaches important lessons about the messy subjective guesswork that goes into trying to make intelligent choices about risk in the first place, for policy makers or for you and me. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says radiation from cell phones might cause cancer. OMG!!! Your phone is ringing! Now what?

BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's environment agency gave its definitive approval on Wednesday for construction of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, a controversial $17 billion project in the Amazon that has drawn criticism from native Indians and conservationists. The regulator, Ibama, issued licenses to the consortium in charge of Belo Monte to build the massive dam on the Xingu River, a tributary to the Amazon

Since the turn of the 21st century, the number scientific papers published predominantly by Chinese researchers in any of the Nature journals has risen from six to nearly 150 according to a new index published by Nature on May 12. ( Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) Campuses such as Tsinghua University and Peking University have become world-class institutions and the overall volume of scientific publications from China has risen from roughly 20,000 in 2000 to 130,000 in 2010, according to Thomson-Reuters.

By Nina Chestney and Jackie Cowhig LONDON (Reuters) - Germany's plan to shut all its nuclear power plants by 2022 will add up to 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually as the country turns to fossil fuels, analysts said on Tuesday. [More]

This morning, the world witnessed the safe landing of the space shuttle Endeavour, after a 16-day mission to the International Space Station. For those of us inhabiting Earth’s more western time zones, we got to watch the landing last night, with no inconvenience, other than having to divert from the Colbert Report. While I did not travel to the Kennedy Space Center for the landing and recovery of the Planetary Society’s experiment known as Shuttle LIFE, my experience was infinitely better than it was the last time that I had an experiment on a shuttle, when I did go to the Cape to attend the landing.

Editor's note: This article appears in print with the title "In Search of the Black Swan." Half a world away from Japan’s stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, deep in the pine forests of Georgia, hundreds of workers are prepping the ground for an American nuclear renaissance they still believe is on the way. Bulldozers rumble across sunken plateaus of fresh, hard-packed backfill that covers miles of recently buried piping and storm drains.