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Editor's note: In the August issue of Scientific American, cosmologist George Ellis describes why he's skeptical about the concept of parallel universes. Here, multiverse proponent multiverse proponents Alexander Vilenkin and Max Tegmark offer counterpoints, explaining why the multiverse would account for so many features of our universe--and how it might be tested.

HOUSTON -- NASA's last space shuttle ever to visit the International Space Station cast off from the orbiting lab early Tuesday (July 19) to begin one final trip back to Earth. Atlantis launched July 8 on the 135th and last voyage of NASA's 30-year space shuttle program

Continuing with the tradition from last three years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2011 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January 2011. [More]

By Yoko Kubota TOKYO, July 19 (Reuters) - Japan's government said on [More]

We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.

Thanks to Skype, Apple FaceTime and at least a half dozen other mobile video apps, the old-fashioned phone call is becoming pass

The current issue of Nature has a great feature about how mathematical inventions and discoveries often find unexpected applications, sometimes decades after their first appearance.

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Many people go offline over the weekend, and are busy catching up at work on Monday.

By Katharine Sanderson of Nature magazine Babies who were exposed to certain organic pollutants in the womb are at a highly increased risk of neural tube defects leading to conditions such as spina bifida, according to researchers in China. Neural tube defects, in which the spinal cord, the brain or their coverings fail to develop completely, arise very early in pregnancy and affect more than 320,000 infants worldwide every year.

Nuclear fission powers the movement of Earth's continents and crust, a consortium of physicists and other scientists is now reporting, confirming long-standing thinking on this topic. Using neutrino detectors in Japan and Italy--the Kamioka Liquid-Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) and the Borexino Detector--the scientists arrived at their conclusion by measuring the flow of the antithesis of these neutral particles as they emanate from our planet. Their results are detailed July 17 in Nature Geoscience .

Iceland is known as the "land of ice and fire," but new findings suggest that the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean could easily take over that title. In addition to the seven volcanic islands that make up this Antarctic archipelago, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) recently discovered that 12 volcanoes lurk below the water's surface. [More]

Bill Borucki is the principal investigator for NASA's planet-finding Kepler spacecraft. At a recent meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Borucki explained how long it will be before Kepler can tell us whether habitable, Earth-like planets are common or rare: [More]

(especially if you are like a mouse, which you are)

The Open Laboratory is the annual anthology of the best writing on science blogs.