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By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine The International Space Station (ISS) is just one space-shuttle flight away from completion, but the construction boom in low-Earth orbit looks set to continue for at least another decade.

The nature of mathematics is elucidated by one mathematician's account of how a memory word used by drummers in ancient India led him to the classic problem of the traveling salesman's route Mathematics, like every branch of knowledge, is the product of the interplay between past and present, between accumulated knowledge and curiosity, between an autonomous structure and the tastes and needs of the time. What one age considers a pressing question, another may not ask at all. The pure mathematics of one era may be applied in another, perhaps centuries later.

Scientific American examines cloud computing, a network-centric approach to delivering information and services [More]

Key concepts Electricity [More]

Time-shared access to supercomputers or computing clusters cloistered in laboratory data rooms and university basements has helped scientists for decades with problems requiring massive amounts of number-crunching muscle. This is now changing as scientists come to rely on software and storage delivered via the Web, aka "cloud computing," as a resource for organizing and analyzing research data. Biotech and physical sciences are two fields in particular that are gravitating skyward, at least piecemeal

The idea of cloud computing is to make all the information and services run in data centers around the world available via the Web. The reality of this is daunting.

A robot must protect its own existence. [More]

By Christopher Le Coq BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union should halt the rapid extinction of plant and animal species by 2020 because it will cost less than trying to repair the damage once it is done, Europe's environment chief said on Tuesday. [More]

Changing wind patterns could accelerate sea level rise along the West Coast, new research suggests. The cause is an apparent shift in a climate cycle called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, said researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The notion that airships represent the future of air cargo is being revived by a new generation of entrepreneurs some 75 years after a catastrophic fireball brought the industry to a screeching halt. Far safer than the Hindenburg, whose tragic 1937 docking remains an icon of aerospace gone wrong, these modern airships are a hybrid of lighter-than-air and fixed-wing aircraft

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Quickening climate change in the Arctic including a thaw of Greenland's ice could raise world sea levels by up to 1.6 meters by 2100, an international report showed on Tuesday. [More]

Dieters take note: thinking in detail about eating can reduce actual food consumption, according to a study in the December 10, 2010, issue of Science .

Editor-in-Chief Mariette DiChristina and her daughters show us how to make Oobleck, a substance that's not quite liquid and not quite solid. For more fun activities to do with your kids visit scientificamerican.com/BringScienceHome.

Key concepts Gravity [More]

Will Al Qaeda respond to the death of Osama bin Lade n with serious cyber attacks? [More]