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LINDAU, Germany--Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates thrilled a crowd of 566 young researchers from 77 countries gathered here June 26 for opening ceremony of the 61st Meeting of Nobel Laureates, and he wasted no time in telling them what to do.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A tear on Sunday in a temporary berm allowed Missouri River flood waters to surround containment buildings and other vital areas of a Nebraska nuclear plant, but reactor systems were not affected.

By Janelle Weaver of Nature magazine Scientists have developed a gene-repair kit that treats the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia in mice. [More]

By Erica Check Hayden of Nature magazine Scientists have identified the molecular players central to an incurable brain injury common in premature babies, and have shown how such injuries might one day be treated, sparing people from lifelong conditions such as cerebral palsy. In babies born before their lungs are fully developed, lack of oxygen can disrupt nerve cells' ability to make a protective coating, called myelin, that makes up the brain's 'white matter'. [More]

Plutonium has a half-life of about 24,000 years. And scientists have known for decades that even in small doses, it is highly toxic , leading to radiation illness, cancer and often to death. After the March nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, people the world over worried that plutonium poisoning might affect those near the compromised plant--and beyond

Neodenticula seminae, a microscopic strand of photosynthesizing plankton, is common in much of the northern Pacific Ocean. [More]

By Antoni Slodkowski FUKUSHIMA, Japan (Reuters) - Angry parents of children in Japan's Fukushima city marched along with hundreds of people on Sunday to demand protection for their children from radiation more than three months after a massive quake and tsunami triggered the worst nuclear disaster in 25 years.

Scientific American math and physics editor Davide Castelvecchi revisits the Monty Hall problem so you can know whether you're better off holding on to your original pick or switching when new information presents itself. [More]

Diabetes incidence has been climbing precipitously in the developed world along with rises in obesity rates and dietary and other lifestyle changes. But a massive new study finds that the rest of the global population has not been immune to these changes.

We humans can so easily give in to our vices. Something as simple as a credit card can weaken self-control. The good news is that the reverse is also true: cash can buffer us from indulgence.

President Obama has called for the withdrawal of 33,000 U.S. troops from Afghanistan over the next year and the remaining 68,000 by the end of 2014, but questions linger regarding what the troops are leaving behind after more than nine years of combat. In particular, Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has accused U.S.

In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the dwarf planet Pluto while looking at photographs of the night sky. Pluto was the first object to be found in what’s now known as the Kuiper belt, a region that’s also full of asteroids. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft intends to visit one or two of them after it flies past Pluto in 2015.

I used to be tough on Stephen Jay Gould, the great evolutionary biologist, who died in 2002. I found him self-righteous and pompous, in person and on the page. In an August 1995 profile of him for Scientific American I summed up his worldview, which emphasizes the role of randomness, or "contingency," in shaping life, as "shit happens." [More]

Editor's note: The following is a response by climatologist Michael E. Mann to a Q&A article that appeared in the June 2011 issue of Scientific American , which became available to readers in May. Last month, Scientific American ran a disappointing interview by Michael Lemonick of controversial retired University of California, Berkeley, physics professor Richard Muller.

I don’t believe you can put a price on inspiration. It is invaluable for the hundreds of medical and physiology researchers from around the world that are swooping into town for the 61st Lindau meetings in Germany. How can being surrounded by 23 Nobel Laureates not be inspiring