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Selling a home is easier now than in the darkest days of 2009, but not much. “For Sale” signs still litter yards across the country, fading in the sun

MAY 10 What does your brain do when you memorize something?

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Box jellyfish have it over the rest of the jellyfish world--they have true eyes, featuring corneas, lenses and retinas. They have a more sophisticated nervous system too

Chinese skylines are defined by construction cranes and the din of jackhammers. China produces 50 percent of the world's cement [ pdf ]--the next largest producer, India is responsible for just 6 percent--to build seemingly endless tracts of high rises, railroads, parking lots, highways, airports and shopping malls.

Amazon Web Services LLC (AWS) , the cloud computing arm of online marketplace Amazon.com, on Friday explained what happened during last week's service outage, which disrupted many of its customers' Web sites. AWS, formed by Amazon in 2006 to capitalize on the cloud computing hype, ran into problems on April 21 with a network configuration change that took several days to fix, slowing or disabling access to sites run by location-based social network Foursquare , fellow cloud service provider Engine Yard , social news outlet Reddit and several others.

You may have thought about blogging but then asked yourself, "What would I write about?" "Who would read it?" Or, "Is this the best use of my time?" If you're a business owner who already wears a hundred hats, the latter may be what keeps you from starting.

A recent study published in Environmental Science & Technology shows the linkage between the illegal production of coca and the continuing destruction of Colombia's rainforest. New plots of coca between 2002 and 2007 accounted for the direct destruction of 890 square kilometers of rainforest. That's roughly 6 percent of total rainforest lost in that period, which totaled to 14,000 square kilometers, or an area slightly larger than Jamaica.

I recently visited Tucson, Arizona and was happy to see a fair amount of people riding bicycles rather than driving through the city’s downtown area. There are wide bike lanes and plenty of racks for parking, and even a monthly street fair where bikers can pick up new and used parts or equipment. All this plus a mostly sunny forecast made Tucson seem like an ideal biking locale, until a friend who lives in the area pointed to the numerous needles and burrs sticking out of his bike tires.

Dear EarthTalk : I read a heart-wrenching story of a polar bear that swam 400 miles with its cub on its back in search of an ice floe to rest on. It survived but its cub did not

If we cannot find aliens in the stars, we might create alien intelligences on Earth

By Suzanne Cosgrove [More]

The world’s most advanced cosmic-ray detector took 16 years and $2 billion to build, and not long ago it looked as though it would wind up mothballed in some warehouse.

Most dog and cat owners will happily describe their pet's disposition down to the smallest, human-like detail. But how much of that is over-reaching anthropomorphizing and how much is an individual animal's actual "personality" shining through?

The FDA approved biotech drug Benlysta to treat lupus, the first new treatment for the autoimmune disease in 50 years.