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From Nature magazine [More]

Oil drilling has sparked a frenzied prosperity in Jeff Keller's formerly quiet corner of western North Dakota in recent years, bringing an infusion of jobs and reviving moribund local businesses. [More]

Human activities are pushing Earth toward a "tipping point" that could cause sudden, irreversible changes in relatively stable conditions that have allowed civilization to flourish, a new study warns. [More]

By Ben Hirschler LONDON (Reuters) - Parasitic mites have turbo-charged the spread of a virus responsible for a rise in honey bee deaths around the world, scientists said on Thursday. Bee populations have been falling rapidly in many countries, fuelled by a phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Peacock mantis shrimp with its rock-hard hammer clubs; courtesy of S. Baron The psychedelic -looking peacock mantis shrimp ( Odontodactylus scyllarus ) has a decidedly non-peacenik way of getting a meal: clubbing it. [More]

During the July 4th weekend of 1994, while riding in a 1988 Chevy Blazer with his wife at the wheel, a computer engineer named Jeff Bezos laid the groundwork for a retail revolution. Back then, the Internet was an insider's tool, largely limited to government and academic circles

My old apartment in New York City had seen better days. Stains had darkened the carpet by several shades, and gusts of wind would blow crumbs of decaying brick from the walls

"Please say your destination or flight number for connecting flight information and gate assignments." That was Ava .

Dear EarthTalk : How do I learn about what pesticides may be on the food I eat? [More]

Key concepts [More]

Credit: NAOJ The universe is a big place, and by peering across it astronomers get to look back in time . A galaxy or supernova so far away that it takes two billion years for its light to reach us will be seen here as it appeared two billion years ago. Remarkably, today s best telescopes can look across the majority of cosmic time, spying on galaxies as they looked just hundreds of millions of years after the big bang.

Imagine being an extraterrestrial geologist in geostationary orbit above the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s. You’re the first explorers to reach Earth (underpants-thieving aliens aside), and you haven’t got a lot of data on this little blue marble

Some dinosaurs were really huge. And now we may have a better way to estimate just how heavy these giants were. Researchers have developed a method to weigh dinosaurs, based on laser scans of their skeletons.

Biologists once thought that human beings were phys

“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote English poet John Donne. Nearly four centuries later science is gaining a fuller appreciation of just how literally true that is. [More]