Two decades ago, Greg Marshall was diving off the reefs of Belize studying queen conchs when he noticed a reef shark passing by with a remora clinging to its belly. The thought occurred to Marshall, who was then a graduate student in marine environmental science, that if a camera could be attached...
A LIFE DECODED My Genome: My Life By J. Craig Venter Viking. 390 pp. $25.95 We already know some things about J. Craig Venter: for example, that the self-styled renegade biologist and genome sequencer has little patience for governmental or academic bureaucracy. There are also the biological deta...
A long-simmering debate over whether the results of government-funded research should be made freely available to the public could take a big step toward resolution as members of a House and Senate conference committee meet today to finalize the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services approp...
For years, astronomers speculated that a giant, mysterious force lay at the center of the Milky Way, but it wasn't until four years ago that UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez definitively showed what it was.
Neanderthals, those beetle-browed cousins of ancestral humans who went mysteriously extinct 30,000 years ago, are often depicted as dark-haired and swarthy. Now a study of ancient DNA indicates that at least some of them had fair skin and red hair.
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 28 -- The fires of Southern California were largely abating on Sunday. Hills on both ends of San Diego County still blazed, as did a wooded canyon in Orange County and the tall, dead trees of the San Bernardino Mountains. But with a weekend of favorable winds and even a smattering...
NEW YORK, Oct. 25 -- James D. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA, announced his retirement Thursday after controversy erupted over comments he made suggesting that black people are less intelligent than whites.
Bush administration officials acknowledged yesterday that they heavily edited testimony on global warming, delivered to Congress on Tuesday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after the president's top science adviser and other officials questioned its scientific...
If you need satellite images to put the news of the day in perspective, the news is probably not good. Satellite photography is the preferred method for announcing the arrival of hurricanes and it has become indispensable to showing the scale of the fires that are ravaging Southern California thi...
George H.W. Bush: Call your dermatologist. New research suggests that broccoli, the vegetable that the former president famously demonized as inedible, can prevent the damage from ultraviolet light that often leads to skin cancer. And as Bush would surely appreciate, he would not even have to eat...
Fourth in a monthly series For scientists, global warming is a disaster movie, its opening scenes set at the poles of Earth. The epic already has started. And it's not fiction. The scenes are playing, at the start, in slow motion: The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centu...
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 21 -- Mark Rebholz had flown across the North Atlantic in an open-cockpit biplane with Steve Fossett. So when the more famous adventure pilot was reported missing in a stunt plane over the dry mountain terrain southeast of Reno on Sept. 3, Rebholz felt as much amused interest as...
NEW YORK, Oct. 19 -- James Watson, who in 1962 shared a Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA, on Friday canceled a tour to promote his latest book after suggesting in a published interview that black people are less intelligent than whites.
A steroid drug long given to treat the facial paralysis of Bell's palsy improves the rate of recovery, but the antivirus drug acyclovir does not, researchers reported.
