NASA is working to solve a potentially dangerous vibration problem in its next generation of launching vehicles.

  Researchers say that coastal landscapes somewhat disturbed by development can often still adequately perform ?services?like storm protection.

  Jeroen van der Veer, Royal Dutch Shell?s chief executive, offers his views on the energy challenge facing the world and the challenge posed by global warming.

  Some are challenging earlier ideas about how water naturally flows because the streams studied then were not ?natural archetypes?but rather the artifacts of 18th and 19th century dam-building and deforestation.

  An international team of scientists found evidence that Polynesians and Micronesians were more closely related to East Asians, and had few links to western Pacific islanders.

  Uruguayan scientists have uncovered fossil evidence of the biggest species of rodent ever found, more than eight feet long and weighing between 1,700 and 3,000 pounds.

  A talk by Steven W. Running, a Nobel laureate and climate researcher, was canceled in Choteau, Mont., a small farming and ranching town.

  Australia said that it would send a ship to pick up two anti-whaling activists who jumped on a Japanese vessel.

  A species of self-destructing palm trees that flower once every 100 years and then die has been discovered in Madagascar.

  NASA?s Messenger spacecraft has captured a new view of the planet Mercury.

  President Bush has exempted the Navy from environmental laws designed to protect whales from potentially harmful sonar.

  The United States remains the world leader in scientific and technological innovation, but its dominance is threatened by economic development elsewhere, particularly in Asia.

  At least 20 endangered sea turtles have washed up dead along the southern Bangladesh coast over the last week.

  Pope Benedict XVI has canceled a speech at the prestigious La Sapienza University in Rome amid opposition by professors and students who say he is hostile to science.