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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]

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

You might have learned about mimicry in high school biology class. [More]

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Trees in the Arctic region may grow 500 km (300 miles) further north by 2100 as climate change greens the barren tundra and causes sweeping change to wildlife, a leading expert said. [More]

Measles has been all but eradicated in the developed world, but it still claims more than 160,000 lives in developing countries. Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, has been hit hard in the past few years.

By Yoko Kubota and Scott DiSavino TOKYO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - One of the reactors at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant has a hole in its main vessel following a meltdown of fuel rods, leading to a leakage of radioactive water, its operator said on Thursday. [More]

By Nicola Jones of Nature magazine When audiences saw dramatic scenes of people setting their tap water on fire in the Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland, hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," was thrown into the spotlight. [More]

* Work often involves picking winners and losers * Decisions not always popular with civilians [More]