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Hotspot Shield has just released an iOS version that gives iPhone and iPad users easy, secure VPN access. However, there's a difference: Unlike the PC product, mobile isn't free.

Norman F. Ramsey may not be a household name, but he was a giant of 20th-century experimental physics.

By peering into the distance with the biggest and best telescopes in the world, astronomers have managed to glimpse exploding stars, galaxies and other glowing cosmic beacons as they appeared just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

STATE COLLEGE, Pa.--Last night I witnessed the aftermath of the brief, angry riot at Penn State: an overturned news van being righted by a bulldozer, debris from battered cars and upended trash cans littering the street, college kids in “Joe Knows Football” t-shirts stumbling away from College Avenue with pepper sprayed red eyes and tear-stained faces, courtesy of the police. The students had reacted violently to the 10 p.m

What do you do when a species is rapidly disappearing in the wild and two of its most likely in-captivity studs decide to cuddle with each other instead of with eligible bachelorettes? That’s the problem Toronto Zoo is encountering this week as two endangered male African penguins ( Spheniscus demersus ) recently brought to the zoo for breeding purposes seem more concerned with spending time with one another than with two eager females. [More]

As the country awaits results from a nationwide safety study on the natural gas drilling process of fracking, a separate government investigation into contamination in a place where residents have long complained that drilling fouled their water has turned up alarming levels of underground pollution. A pair of environmental monitoring wells drilled deep into an aquifer in Pavillion, Wyo., contain high levels of cancer-causing compounds and at least one chemical commonly used in hydraulic fracturing, according to new water test results released yesterday by the Environmental Protection Agency. [More]

By Arshad Mohammed and Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States will study a new route for the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline, U.S. officials said on Thursday, delaying any final approval beyond the 2012 election and sparing President Barack Obama a politically risky decision for now. [More]

By Meredith Wadman of Nature magazine It has been a medical mystery for 67 years, ever since the British geneticist Anthony Allison established that carriers of one mutated copy of the gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia are protected from malaria. [More]

This is an exciting day for the #SciAmBlogs network – launch of the brand new blog by Katherine Harmon! She is a reporter and associate editor for Scientific American covering health, medicine, neuroscience and general life sciences for the website and you are probably familiar with her articles and blog posts (on the Observations blog). You can also follow her on Twitter at @katherineharmon . Katherine’s new blog is Octopus Chronicles , where she will write about this most intelligent and most charismatic of all invertebrates – the science, the history, the art, the works… This blog will be her “writing laboratory” as she works on her new book about these fascinating animals.

The world could burn nearly 8,000 million metric tons of coal by 2035 -- most of it in China -- unless countries radically change their energy policies, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). The IEA's World Energy Outlook released this week found that China almost singlehandedly fueled the rise in coal use throughout the first decade of the 21st century

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Bees thrum among bright red blossoms on a spring day on Mount Diablo, near San Francisco Bay.

The lethal fault cuts through the middle of a Tennessee bean field and then ducks beneath the Mississippi River, making a beeline for New Madrid , Missouri. Named the Reelfoot fault, this geological crack combined with neighbouring faults two centuries ago to unleash a series of devastating earthquakes that have been called the biggest to strike the contiguous United States in recorded history.

It is one of the most serious allegations that could be made about a doctor: manipulating patients' histories to make money. So it is no wonder that the charges, levied by editors of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in January against medical researcher Andrew Wakefield, are still getting close scrutiny. Now an American whistleblower advocacy group has joined the fray over Wakefield, who in 1998 hypothesized a link, now scientifically disproven, between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism