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A federal government shutdown would cut short a key NASA field campaign to monitor Arctic ice. For the past three weeks, NASA researchers and crew have been surveying Arctic land and sea ice using specially equipped aircraft. The work is part of a larger project, "Operation IceBridge," designed to fill a gap between NASA's now-defunct ICESat satellite and its replacement, which isn't scheduled to launch until 2016.

By Philip Ball The idea that neglected environments encourage crime and antisocial behavior has been around since the 1980s. [More]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Many fastest-growing cities, especially those in the developing world, stand to suffer disproportionately from the effects of climate change, a new study reported on Thursday. Few urban areas are taking the necessary steps to protect their residents -- billions of people around the globe -- from such likely events as heat waves and rising seas, according to research to appear in Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability and European Planning Studies.

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Aftershocks--larger than any quake to hit the mainland U.S. in years--continue to rattle a beleaguered Japan.

The latest chapter in the legal battle over gene patenting unfolded this week during oral arguments (MP3) made in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. A year after a somewhat surprising victory in a New York federal district court, a group of plaintiffs led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) now hopes the U.S.

As northeastern Japan copes with Thursday's magnitude-7.1* aftershock, the largest since the disastrous March 11 magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami , the injection of nitrogen gas into one of the crippled reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was interrupted as Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCo) workers evacuated to a safer site, according to the Japan Broadcasting Corp (JBP) . A tsunami warning had been issued briefly but was later canceled .

Today is January 28, and Lenina has a smashing headache; she is a Streptococcus pneumoniae researcher. Not that this was the main reason for the headache, but an important meeting was being held today to launch the Pneumococcal Molecular Epidemiology Network’s [PMEN] new paper in Science . Oddly enough, her role at the meeting is to summarize the history of Streptococcus pneumoniae prior to her group’s latest bit of information

Creatures that live in the dark may lose their sight over evolutionary time. They may even lose their eyes entirely. Now it appears that they also lose sleep

Photograph by Benjamin Lowy Opportunity: After fleeing marriage to a Taliban husband, Samiya Amiri found work--and the beginning of a new life--as a renewable-power engineer.

Like most of us, NASA astronauts have to wake up and get to work--even when they're in space. So NASA is running a contest to select two new wake-up songs for the STS-134 shuttle crew when it's at the International Space Station.

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Yoko Nishikawa TOKYO, April 8 (Reuters) - A strong earthquake of magnitude [More]

Poor sanitation can foster transmission of all sorts of nasty bacterial bugs. But a new study has found that among common bacteria, antibiotic resistance is brewing in the New Delhi water supply--and spreading in at least 20 strains, including some that cause dysentery and cholera. [More]

Winter blues, spring fever--most of us take seasonal changes in mood for granted. According to a new study, the cause might be the seasons tinkering with the chemicals in our brain. As reported in the November 3 Journal of Neuroscience , researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health found evidence of seasonal differences in dopamine--a chemical messenger involved in motivation, pleasure, movement and learning.

For many years psychologists have explored whether narcissism and creativity are linked, and some studies have suggested that the self-obsessed may, in fact, be more creative than the rest of us. But new research from Cornell University argues otherwise. Two hundred and forty-four under