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By Philip Ball The first microscopes were a lot better than they are usually given credit for. [More]

In the last few years NASA has built and launched two world-class climate satellites, both of which promised invaluable new data on the natural and human influences on Earth's changing climate. Neither of them, however, will ever deliver the data that climate scientists so eagerly expected from them.

When asked recently on The Today Show how he cured himself of his addiction, Two and a Half Men sitcom star Charlie Sheen replied, "I closed my eyes and made it so with the power of my mind." Until last month, he was the highest paid actor on TV, despite his well-known bad-boy lifestyle and persistent problems with alcohol and cocaine. After the rest of his season's shows were canceled by producers, Sheen has gone on an interview tear with many bizarre statements , including that he is on a "winning" streak. His claims of quitting a serious drug habit on his own, however, is perhaps one of his least eccentric statements.

A new study suggests some of Antarctica's ice sheet grows from the bottom up, adding a new wrinkle to efforts to predict how the continent's glaciers will respond to climate change. Radar images show that water under the base of the ice sheet refreezes into ice, creating a new bottom layer that accounts for up to half the total thickness of the ice sheet in some locations

Dear EarthTalk : Isn’t it a waste that we buy water in plastic bottles when it is basically free out of our taps?

If you’ve ever commuted through New York City during rush hour, you’ve probably experienced stress-inducing traffic, over-stuffed subway cars, or delays that don’t care if you’ve given yourself an extra half hour. In 1924 the New York metropolitan area’s population was already large enough to get the Transit Commission thinking of ways to accommodate future traffic needs

Who we know determines who we are. Three new books reveal how much heroes and even distant acquaintances influence us.

Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the March 1961 issue of Scientific American. In the days when civilized men believed that the world was flat they had no reason to think about gravity. There was up and down

Bear-size beavers, mammoths, horses, camels and saber-toothed cats used to roam North America, but by 11,000 years ago most such large mammals had died off. To this day, experts debate what caused this late Pleistocene extinction: climate change, overhunting by humans, disease--or something else? Eric Scott, curator of paleontology at the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, Calif., suggests it was something else: namely, the immigration of bison from Eurasia

March 1961 Food for Climate Skeptics [More]

Every villain has his Achilles' heel. And microscopic scoundrels are no exception.

By Leigh Coleman BILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters) - Marine scientists are debating whether 80-plus bottlenose dolphins found dead along the U.S. Gulf Coast since January were more likely to have perished from last year's massive oil spill or a winter cold snap. [More]

By Amy Maxmen Precious memories need not fade if a report today bears fruit. [More]

A few years back, the sun went into a lull, its activity tailing off like a rambunctious child settling down for a nap. The lull was no surprise; it is a normal part of the sun's roughly 11-year cycle of activity, over which the number of magnetized regions known as sunspots waxes and wanes

As the familiar battles over evolution education continue to play out in U.S. state legislatures and school boards, other countries are facing very different dynamics. Much of the world lives outside of any law that requires separation of church and state, making creationism trickier to disentangle from public school curricula.