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...
In the decades since young gay men in the United States started dying from a mysterious syndrome in the 1980s, scientists have wondered how and when the AIDS virus arrived. Many scenarios have been proposed, including one early but now-discounted theory that the disease was imported by a promiscu...
BAGHDAD, Nov. 1 -- From store clerks selling cigarettes by generator power, to military commanders poring over aerial maps, Iraqis and Americans are striving to understand the sharp decrease in violence over the past several months and what it might herald for the future of Iraq.
A little-remarked feature of pending legislation on domestic surveillance has provoked alarm among university and public librarians who say it could allow federal intelligence-gathering on library patrons without sufficient court oversight.
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...
