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It is probably no surprise to my regular readers that I get a little exercised about the science wars that play out across the U.S. in various school boards and court actions. It’s probably unavoidable, given that I think about science for a living — when you’ve got a horse in the race, you end up spending a lot of time at the track

By Timothy Gardner WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. [More]

CREDIT: Martin Cron, via Flikr One day after new test results showed that only 32 percent of U.S.

Click to see full image, with diameters of Earth and Jupiter for scale. Credit: NASA/SDO Space weather forecasters are keeping a close watch on a large collection of sunspots that could unleash blasts of energy or charged particles toward Earth in the coming days. Sunspot region 1476, the dark patch resembling the Hawaiian Islands in the photo at left, is located near the center of the sun s face as seen from Earth but has yet to act out in any major way.

By Daniel Cressey of Nature magazine About one-quarter of seafood sold as `sustainable' is not meeting that goal, according to an analysis taking aim at the two leading bodies that grant this valuable label to fisheries. In an online paper in Marine Policy and at a conference this week in Edinburgh, UK, fisheries biologist Rainer Froese of the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, launched a stinging attack on the schemes by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the marine-conservation organization Friend of the Sea (FOS) to certify fisheries as sustainable. [More]

Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs [More]

In 2010, a massive, magnitude-8.8 earthquake struck the south central coast of Chile, rupturing beaches and launching a tsunami that rode inland with devastating effect. In an instant, whole sections of the coastline were transformed, with large swaths of sand and rock lifted from beneath the waves.

Part 5 of a 5-part series By Allen Frances* [More]

The sun is zipping through interstellar space more slowly than once thought, suggesting the giant shock wave long suspected of existing in front of the sun is not actually there, researchers say. [More]

New observations from a NASA spacecraft show that the huge asteroid Vesta is a battered protoplanet left over from the solar system's early days, with a unique mix of characteristics unknown from any other space rock. [More]

One of the oldest unsolved problems in mathematics is also among the easiest to grasp. The weak Goldbach conjecture says that you can break up any odd number into the sum of, at most, three prime numbers (num

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's Mount Fuji may be sitting on a large, active fault that could trigger a magnitude-7 earthquake, changing the shape of the mountain and devastating nearby communities, the education ministry said on Thursday. A survey commissioned by the ministry found a 30-km fault beneath Japan's highest mountain, believed by many to be sacred, and research results indicate it was likely to be active, a ministry official said.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June.

Launch of an Israeli Shavit rocket via Wikimedia Commons Last week I had the opportunity to sit down with Daniel Hershkowitz , Israel s minister of science and technology, to talk about his country s capabilities and ambitions in space. We spoke about Israel s homegrown platforms for launching satellites into space; the commercial, military and scientific applications of those satellites; and whether the country has plans to return to the human spaceflight arena, almost 10 years after its first foray ended in tragedy.