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By Nadia Drake of Nature magazine Every year, thousands of undocumented migrants make the dangerous crossing from Mexico to Arizona in the United States through the Sonoran Desert. [More]

In dreams, could we discover where the mysterious feeling of revelation comes from? 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.

PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru -- On a busy, dusty street beside a huge open-air market, signs reading “oro” mark shops that trade in gold.

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A team of IBM researchers spent four years building Watson, a computer system clever enough to beat the best Jeopardy players in the world.

India is running out of water for crops. Most of the water-intensive agriculture in the nation takes place in Punjab, a state in the northwest that makes up 2 percent of the country’s territory but provides more than 50 percent of its grain reserves. Farmers there currently pump out 45 percent more groundwater than is replenished by monsoon rains

The article " Food Fight " in the April issue details Roger Beachy's involvement in the birth of genetic engineering of food crops, how he went on to become an avid defender of the new technology and how these beliefs will shape his tenure at the agriculture department's newly formed National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Here he answers four more questions for readers about his own background and agriculture in the developing world. How did your Amish background shape your interest in agriculture

Roger Beachy grew up in a traditional Amish family on a small farm in Ohio that produced food “in the old ways,” he says, with few insecticides, herbicides or other agrochemicals. He went on to become a renowned expert in plant viruses and sowed the world’s first genetically modified food crop--a tomato plant with a gene that conferred resistance to the devastating tomato mosaic virus

By Yoko Kubota and Kiyoshi Takenaka TOKYO, April 11 (Reuters) - Japanese nuclear power plant [More]

Spring is in the air. And so is pollen. Local plants put forth an abundance of the stuff in a bid to ensure their continued existence, even in the hardest concrete jungles.

[ Yawn sound. ] Oh sorry. Well, now that I’ve yawned, you might be yawning too.

April 9 (Reuters) - The following lists the impact of theearthquake and tsunami that hit northeast Japan on March 11 and [More]

* Beijing to closely monitor Japan's nuclear actions * China bans imports of farm products from 12 areas [More]

Is there such a thing as a spiritual fact? Finding? Discovery?

One of the more predictable outcomes of a government shutdown --in fact, the hyperbolic chatter alone regarding the uncertainties of such a major disruption is enough to do the trick--is that there will be a noticeable surge in the nation’s religious beliefs. According to Duke University psychologist Aaron Kay and his colleagues, God and government are more than just two sides of the same US-issued coin. In fact, they share a common cognitive denominator.