The building housing reactor 4 (left) appears severely damaged – despite the reactor itself being shut down Over the days of the Fukushima crisis, attention has switched from reactor building 1 to 3, to 2, back to 3 – and now, to 4. This is a surprise. Reactors 4, 5 and 6 were shut down at the time of Friday’s earthquake, with some or all of their fuel rods extracted and left in... 

No limits on neurotoxic pollution by cement plants. No protecting endangered fish in San Francisco Bay. And no regulation of greenhouse gases. Those are just some of the “riders” tacked onto HR 1, the GOP spending bill defeated March 9 in the Senate but sure to return as Congress negotiates how the U.S. government will be supported. The bill would have funded the government for the remainder of... 

  Geneticists have linked the physical appearance of humans to patches of DNA lost in the 5 million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees. One loss prevented men from growing penile barbs, which chimps possess. Another enlarged some regions of our brain. Only 2 percent of the DNA in our genome forms protein-coding genes. The rest, once called “junk DNA,” helps control and... 

Making waves isn’t conducive to staying asleep, at least when the waves are a type of brain signal associated with being awake. A type of brain activity known as an alpha wave emanates from the back of the head when a person is awake but relaxing with eyes closed. Scientists used to think that the wave was subdued and disappeared as a person fell deeper and deeper into sleep. But the alpha wave... 

Circadian rhythms are well known to biologists, with hundreds of studies analyzing fundamental links between sunlight, cellular clocks, hormones and metabolism function. But for the first few billion years of Earthly life, it wasn’t just solar cycles that mattered. Lunar and tidal cycles were just as important, and for modern marine creatures they still are. Yet these cycles have received only a... 

NASA will launch a new satellite designed to probe how the sun and the Earth’s atmosphere conspire to shape Earth’s climate early Friday morning. The satellite, called Glory, will watch the sun and the Earth’s atmosphere simultaneously to see how they interact. The six-foot-tall satellite comes equipped with instruments to measure the amount of solar energy that strikes the top of the atmosphere,... 

Radiation from a mobile phone call can make brain regions near the device burn more energy, according to a new study. Cellphones emit ultra-high-frequency radio waves during calls and data transfers, and some researchers have suspected this radiation — albeit inconclusively — of being linked to long-term health risks like brain cancer. The new brain-scan-based work, to be published Feb. 23 in... 

15 years after NASA astronomer David Williams started searching for them, hundreds of trees grown from space-faring seeds are still missing. The “moon trees,” whose seeds circled the moon 34 times in Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa’s pocket, were welcomed back to Earth with great fanfare in 1971. One was planted in Washington Square in Philadelphia as part of the 1975 bicentennial celebrations.... 

Early in February, the Kepler Space Telescope announced a new bonanza of distant planets, reconfirming that solar systems, possibly hosting life, are common in the universe. So if humanity someday arrives at an extraterrestrial cocktail party, will we be ready to mingle? At the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Fla., researchers practice for contact by trying to talk with dolphins. More than two decades... 

For those of you who can’t make it out to Dallas for this Sunday’s Super Bowl — and, quite frankly, that’s probably all of you — the search wizards of Mountain View, California, have been kind enough to offer us the chance to virtually tour Cowboys Stadium via Google Earth. It couldn’t be simpler. Download the latest version of Google Earth, and type “Cowboys Stadium” into the “Find... 

A newly discovered horned dinosaur called Titanoceratops appears to have reigned long before its more famous descendants, Triceratops and Torosaurus. The species weighed in at around 6,800 kilograms [15,000 pounds] and an enormous 8-foot skull — rivaling Triceratops for size. It is very similar to Triceratops, but with a thinner frill, longer nose and slightly bigger horns. Titanoceratops lived... 

After a month and a half trapped in its mothership, NASA’s NanoSail-D spacecraft has finally unfurled the first solar sail to circle the Earth. Solar sails, gossamer-thin sheets that feel the pressure of the solar wind, have been suggested as a best hope for propelling spacecraft between the stars. They’re the only known method of space travel that doesn’t require carrying heavy fuel on the... 

An important portion of the Himalaya’s glacier cover is currently stable and, thanks to an insulating layer of debris, may be even growing, a new study finds. The study’s conclusion contradicts a portion of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that had to be retracted last year because it could not be substantiated. sciencenewsThough the IPCC report stated that the risk of... 

Eleven species of wild pollinators in the United States have turned up carrying some of the viruses known to menace domestic honeybees, possibly picked up via flower pollen. sciencenewsMost of these native pollinators haven’t been recorded with honeybee viruses before, according to Diana Cox-Foster of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. The new analysis raises the specter of diseases... 

When cooking up the stuff of life, you can’t just substitute margarine for butter. Or so scientists thought. sciencenewsBut now researchers have coaxed a microbe to build itself with arsenic in the place of phosphorus, an unprecedented substitution of one of the six essential ingredients of life. The bacterium appears to have incorporated a form of arsenic into its cellular machinery, and even its... 

A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system’s outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth. “We’ve accumulated 10 years’ more data, double the comets we viewed to test this hypothesis,” said planetary scientist John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Only now should we be able to falsify or verify that you... 

An unusual study of an animal social network suggests that ending up as the butt of unfriendly interactions could be in part inherited. sciencenewsThe study, in yellow-bellied marmots, gives the first look beyond people at what facets of social relationships might have genetic components, says coauthor Daniel Blumstein of UCLA. It’s receiving incoming social attention, particularly in grouchy interactions,... 

Airplanes can punch holes in clouds and make it rain, new research shows. As propeller or jet airplanes pass through the right atmospheric conditions, they make liquid water droplets freeze and immediately drop as snow, leaving a circular fissure behind. Odd clouds can sometimes elude explanation for decades, and these mysterious gaps in the sky, aptly called hole-punch clouds or channel clouds, have... 

With sea ice levels in the Arctic at record lows this month, a new report comparing scientists’ predictions calls for caution in over-interpreting a few weeks worth of data from the North Pole. The Sea Ice Outlook, which will be released this week, brings together more than a dozen teams’ best guesses at how much sea ice will disappear by the end of the warm season in September. This year began... 

Like vacationers taking a pit stop on a long road trip, zircon mineral grains from the northern Appalachians may have stopped off in Michigan before ending up on the Colorado Plateau, a new study suggests. The finding, reported in the June Geology, is a major boost to the notion that a continent-spanning, Amazon-like river system once carried sediments west across North America. sciencenewsA large...