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Even in the information age, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics still gathers much of its data the old-fashioned way. Workers make phone calls to find out what dentists charge for pulling teeth, and they visit stores to write down the prices of CDs and Russet potatoes.

By James Mitchell Crow of Nature magazine Fossilized dinosaur tracks that dot a remote 80-kilometre stretch of Western Australia's coastline are under threat from a proposed natural gas facility, say paleontologists. The tracks were made by multiple species of sauropod, theropod and ornithopod dinosaurs as they walked across mud flats around 130 million years ago.

Dear Earth Talk : How healthy is soy?

In the middle hills and Terai belt of eastern Nepal, a village spent a rare government donation -- about $3,000 -- to build a well that local leaders hoped would relieve the community from acute water stress. But they lacked an understanding of regional groundwater trends, and within three months, the tap dried up

Bedbug sprays sold for residential use in neighborhood stores rarely eradicate or prevent bedbugs. Credit: Amy Maxmen [More]

A simulation of galactic growth shows how a galaxy akin to our own Milky Way might have appeared 10 billion years ago.

Galaxies litter the cosmos by the hundreds of billions.

Key concepts Traits [More]

Global warming is altering--and threatening to erase--much more of the Marshall Islands than the shorelines of this independent Micronesian nation that once served as a Pacific Ocean nuclear weapons test site for the U.S. It is changing the vocabulary and heightening the risk of extinguishing the language and culture of daily life. Locals already have integrated the phrases "climate change" and "seawall" into the nation's two predominant dialects of the Marshallese language, which is unique to this archipelagic country.

One way advertisers convince us to buy something is to remind us that we’ve enjoyed their product before. Unfortunately, we can have fond memories of a product that we’ve never even had. Or that doesn’t even exist

Much of what we know about sex, or think we know, stems from the animal kingdom.

So you may have noticed an elephant in the room--more specifically, an elephantine abstraction that began appearing on our Web site today, like the one outside the margin at the left. That's an Ellie, a stabile designed by Alexander Calder and bestowed by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME).

Nursing homes are unnecessarily administering powerful antipsychotic drugs to many elderly residents, including residents with dementia [1] , according to a new report by the Health and Human Services inspector general. The Food and Drug Administration in 2005 mandated that drug makers issue warning labels [2] on atypical antipsychotics, noting that the drugs--which are generally FDA-approved for treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder--increase the risk of death for elderly patients with dementia. Yet when the government examined 1.4 million Medicare claims from 2007 for atypical antipsychotics for elderly nursing home residents, the government found that 88 percent of the time, the drugs were prescribed to individuals diagnosed with dementia

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Facebook shut down the Syrian military's official page, and Syrian Facebook users began encountering a primitive certificate-forging scam seemingly carried out by the government. See what happens when cyberwarfare comes to the formerly friendly Facebook. The “Facebook revolution” line has been used endlessly in the Middle East.