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Key concepts Solar system [More]

Pluto, please step aside.

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a "new normal" of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday

By Philip Ball of Nature magazine Why are we so complicated? You might imagine that we've evolved that way because it conveys adaptive benefits.

By Virginia Gewin of Nature magazine A massive extinction resulting from habitat loss is under way--but perhaps not as rapidly as is often predicted. A paper published today in Nature explains why past predictions of extinction rates--for example, a 1980 US National Research Council report predicting losses of millions of species by the year 2000--have not been realized. "We have mathematically proven why these 'guesstimates' are flawed," says Fangliang He, an ecologist currently at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, and a co-author of the latest study

Snakes aren’t just lizards without any legs . But a curious group of long, legless lizards look suspiciously like snakes themselves

NASA will launch a scientific instrument into space next month to measure the salt content of the world's oceans, information that could help confirm scientists' suspicions that climate change is accelerating the world's water cycle. The instrument, Aquarius, will launch June 9 as part of a joint mission between NASA and Argentina's space agency. [More]

Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon enjoyed a privileged lifestyle in what is now Luxor about 3,500 years ago. But she may not have been a happy princess towards the end. Two of her three main coronary arteries were calcified, a marker of atherosclerosis

Eighty percent of cushions used in car seats, portable cribs and other baby furnishings contain chemical flame retardants that can accumulate in babies’ bodies, according to a new study to be published Wednesday. More than one-third of the tested products contained the same

By now, we are all familiar with the many reasons we need to lessen our dependency on oil and of the importance in looking for alternative and renewable energery sources. If you need any more convincing, however, maybe you'll go along with an idea printed in the October 11, 1862 Scientific American.

I witnessed a breakup yesterday in the middle of MIT’s vast Infinite Corridor--a hallway known for its heavy traffic and long stretch of straightness. Finals are upon the undergraduates, so perhaps tensions were a bit high for the young, failing couple

By Michael Martina BEIJING (Reuters) - China's landmark Three Gorges Dam project provides benefits to the Chinese people, but has created a myriad of urgent problems from the relocation of more than a million residents to risks of geological disasters, the Chinese government said on Thursday. [More]

* PM Kan says Japan needs fundamental rethink * Kan stops short of declaring a clean break from nuclear [More]

According to standard physics textbooks, quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people and planets