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Used to be that sick kids got lollypops after a visit with the doctor. But in some cases candy can be more than a reward--it can be part of the therapy. Because scientists have found that, in battling chronic infections, sugar can boost the effectiveness of antibiotics

Rain continues to fall (as it has for the past month) in record-breaking amounts across the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, swelling the two waterways and their tributaries. As some residents evacuate and others await word on whether they must flee, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is considering its increasingly limited options for containing a major catastrophe already washing away homes and farmland

Climate change has yet to diminish crop yields in the U.S. corn belt but scientists expect drought to become more common due to global warming in coming years.

By Richard A. [More]

By Declan Butler of Nature magazine Health ministers from the World Health Organization's (WHO's) 193 member states will next week debate when to destroy the two last known remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox, a scourge that was eradicated in 1980. Many scientists argue, however, that the variola stocks should be maintained, perhaps indefinitely

How do you get from Virginia to Paris? For one team of young rocketeers, the way across the Atlantic will involve a homemade model rocket, a chicken egg and some serious competition

Americans are exposed to much more ionizing radiation (the potentially harmful type) than they were 30 years ago. Greater use of medical imaging such as CT scans accounts for almost all the increase. The tests can reveal serious health threats, of course, but they come with risks

Since today is Friday the 13th, I’d like to share with you an unlucky situation I came across in the Scientific American archive.

By Mari Saito TOKYO (Reuters) - Seaweed collected from the coast near Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant and sewage in Tokyo have shown elevated levels of radiation, according to data released by an environmental group and government officials on Friday. [More]

Climate change poses "significant risks" to society, the National Academy of Sciences said yesterday, warning that delaying cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will make dealing with the problem harder in the future. "Each additional ton of greenhouse gases emitted commits us to further change and greater risks," an academy panel said in a new report, which calls for the federal government to take a lead role in combating climate change at home and abroad. [More]

Dear EarthTalk : Our community is talking of culling local deer herd numbers.

What does the scientist who talked about enclosing stars with globes think might be too hard for science? In "Too Hard for Science?" I interview scientists about ideas they would love to explore that they don't think could be investigated. For instance, they might involve machines beyond the realm of possibility, such as particle accelerators as big as the sun, or they might be completely unethical, such as lethal experiments involving people.

To be socially savvy, you have to learn the hierarchy. This skill is so crucial that even babies possess it, according to a study published January 28 in Science . Infants only 10 months old know that bigger beings usually get their way

Key concepts Adaptation [More]

The year was 1848. a young British naturalist named Henry Walter Bates had gone to the Amazon with fellow countryman Alfred Russel Wallace to look for evidence of the origin of species. Over the course of his 11-year stay, he noticed that local relatives of a European butterfly known as the cabbage white--the pierids--were bedecked in the showy reds and yellows of rain forest butterflies called heliconids