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The death of Osama bin Laden on Sunday, after more than a decade of pursuit, is a huge symbolic victory for U.S.

Obesity and dementia have a well-established connection in the medical literature. But a new study shows that just being overweight--with a BMI of 25 or above--in middle age might also significantly increase the odds that a person develops dementia later in life. [More]

They could have used grappling hooks and longbows. The hunting down of Global Enemy No

A new advance in solar cells that tips the surface with minuscule cone structures could neutralize manufacturing defects, boosting efficiency up to 80 percent. In conventional solar panels, more than 50 percent of the charges generated by sunlight are lost due to defects, said Jun Xu, a researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The irregularities in the formation of the crystalline structure of solar cells can trap electrons and limit the transfer of sunlight to electrical energy.

Osama Bin Laden is dead . At least, that's what we've been told, and I tend to believe such things. But how do they know it's him

For the author of Moby-Duck , Donovan Hohn , it all started with a school assignment. In 2008, he challenged his journalism class to find the "archaeology of the ordinary." A student, known to be a bit of an odd one, wrote his assignment on his lucky rubber duck.

We learned all kinds of things from our parents--manners, safety, housekeeping, how to make a cake, how to pump our legs to make ourselves go high on a swing and where to find crayfish in a creek. As they showed us how to reach these small successes in our daily life, they also taught us science knowledge--even though they may not have known a lot about psychology, physiology, chemistry, physics or animal adaptation. In learning by doing, young children get support for their later formal education: they build a set of experiences that they can recall and relate to new information in middle school science classes and beyond.

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Key concepts Liquids and solids [More]

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You don't need an advanced degree in physics or biology to participate in scientific research, just a curiosity about the world around you and an interest in observing, measuring and reporting what you hear and see. The Internet makes it easy these days to take part as an amateur in sophisticated science projects around the world, and now Scientific American is making it even easier for you to find the right one through our new Citizen Science initiative

As a kid, I often spent an afternoon after a big rain storm with my brothers tromping down to a local drainage stream to see what the water had washed in. And it wasn't unusual to find us sitting around the kitchen table with our hands coated in a green, oozy cornstarch-and-water mixture, wondering at its weird properties.

From DNA matching to tracking technology, this report reveals how science aided in bringing down the master terrorist [More]

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER--When NASA scrubbed the shuttle Endeavour 's final launch here on Friday, engineers said there was a best-case and a worst-case scenario. Well, guess what: it was the worst case. The trouble began when an electric heater for the hydraulics system failed to turn on