As water levels in the Great Lakes fall, ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads, adding millions to shipping companies?operating costs.

  The West is the fastest-growing part of the country. It?s also the driest. And climate change could be making matters much, much worse.

  Was getting the lead out of gasoline a factor in the drop in crime?

  Cancer death rates are down in the United States, but certain cancers seem to be becoming more common. Why?

  Barack Obama and Dick Cheney may have a genealogical relationship, but whatever its political symbolism, it is genetically meaningless.

  NASA is planning to begin a mission to the International Space Station on Tuesday, but a last-minute dispute is raising fundamental questions about the risks.

  CRAGs, or Carbon Rationing Action Groups, are slowly springing up across Britain, an example of how the phenomenon of low-carbon living is growing.

  An increasingly vocal and potent anti-coal movement in the West includes ranchers, farmers and religious groups.

  In what opponents say is a first, a Kansas regulator has turned down a permit for a large coal-fired power plant solely because of the global warming gases it would emit.

  Dismay with the kind of work that has often been honored by the Nobel prize in economics has led even a couple of its winners to suggest it be abolished.

  The Coast Guard is planning a base to deal with ships that are plying the Arctic?s increasingly ice-free waters.

  After the full moon, corals dissolve in an orgy of reproduction. Scientists say primitive photoreceptors drive the process.

  James D. Watson, who won the Nobel Prize for helping decipher DNA, apologized ?unreservedly?Thursday for comments reported this week suggesting that black people, over all, are not as intelligent as whites.

  The archaic human species possessed a critical gene known to underlie speech, according to DNA evidence.