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By Jon Herskovitz [More]

Some extinct animals have anatomical oddities that seem destined to be confined to the marginalia of history. Questionable characters, such as the single-fingered dinosaur and the flightless, club-winged bird , ultimately died off despite--if not because of--their idiosyncratic adaptations. [More]

A genetic archaeologist of sorts, Cary Fowler works to save the wild species threatened by crop domestication. Fowler is the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, an organization that seeks to preserve the genetic diversity of plants in seed banks.

By Mayumi Negishi and Kazunori Takada TOKYO, March 25 (Reuters) - Radiation fears escalated in Japan on Friday after workers suffered burns as they tried to cool an earthquake-crippled nuclear power station, while the government sowed confusion over whether it was widening an evacuation zone around the plant. Prime Minister Naoto Kan, making his first public statement on the crisis in a week, said the situation at the Fukushima nuclear complex north of Tokyo was "nowhere near the point" of being resolved.

Posted for Jen Christiansen, Art Director, Information Graphics I'm in Pamplona, Spain, sitting at a table strewn with looseleaf paper, scissors and tubes of paste. My table is host to a German, a Swede, two Norwegians and a American

On December 1, 1969, Jersey Central Power & Light initiated fission in the fuel rods of the nation's first boiling-water nuclear reactor--one of 31 ultimately built in the U.S. The first "turnkey" plant, Oyster Creek nuclear generating station in New Jersey was sold for less than $100 million in 1964--a price well below what it would ultimately cost to build the reactor. The point was to prove that a nuclear power facility could be built as cheaply as a coal-fired power plant, and the key to that was a smaller safety system

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the April 1861 issue of Scientific American.

APRIL 1961 Tiling [More]

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. Penguin Press, 2011 [More]

It’s been more than a decade since the human genome was published.

By Chaiwat Subprasom MAE SAI, Thailand, March 25 (Reuters) - At least 74 people were killed in a strong earthquake that struck Myanmar, state media said on Friday, while a series of aftershocks have caused panic but only limited damage in Thailand and Laos.

They missed the heavy metal explosion of the 1980s, but this all-girl robotics team from Bronx High School of Science take their name from 80s rockers Iron Maiden. They show off their mechanical talents at a robotics competition in New York

We see it all the time on shows like Bones and CSI. Skeletal remains can yield all sorts of clues--gender, age, past physical traumas

By Yoko Kubota TOKYO, March 25 (Reuters) - Injuries to workers battling to bring Japan's earthquake-damaged nuclear plant under control will set back efforts to stabilise it, officials said, as fear of radiation from the complex spread both at home and abroad. Engineers are trying to regain control of the six-reactor nuclear power station in Fukushima, 240 km (150 miles) north of the capital, two weeks after an earthquake and tsunami battered the plant and devastated northeastern Japan, leaving about 27,400 people dead or missing. Explosions in three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power station last week made this the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl and raised fears of a catastrophic meltdown

John Milnor, an American mathematician best known for the discovery of exotic hyperspheres, was awarded the 2011 Abel Prize , the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced March 23. [More]