It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube, stitching ordinary chemical ingredients together to make life's most extraordinary molecule. Until recently, however, even the most sophisticated laboratories could make only small snippets of DNA -- an extra gene or two to b...
Depending on where you are, this is going to be a hotter, wetter, drier, windier, calmer, dirtier, buggier or hungrier century than mankind has seen in a while. In some places, it may be deadlier, too.
NEW YORK The first time Neil deGrasse Tyson got a good look at the universe, he thought it was a hoax. He was a 9-year-old, visiting the Hayden Planetarium on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and when the lights went down and a narrated tour of the night sky began, an ocean of stars twinkled overhead.
Nearly four decades ago, psychologist Stanley Milgram had a volunteer stand stock still on a busy New York sidewalk and look up at the sky. About one in every 25 passersby stopped to look up, too. When five volunteers were recruited to sky-gaze, nearly one in five passersby stopped to look up.
NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Dec. 15 -- Organizers of the international climate conference here presented an open-ended compromise proposal to delegates from 190 nations early Saturday in hopes of bridging disagreements over how to begin negotiating a new treaty to combat global warming.
Washington Post Environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin was online to discuss the latest developments at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Infectious-disease expert David N. Gilbert was making rounds at the Providence Portland Medical Center in Oregon in April when he realized that an unusual number of patients, including young, vigorous adults, were being hit by a frightening pneumonia.
Washington Post staff writer Marc Kaufman was online to discuss whether the human body is capable of living in space for long periods of time without suffering serious damage.
Measurements taken by the Japanese spacecraft Hinode have confirmed that the winds, reaching speeds of 2 million mph, that blow across the face of the sun are powered by magnetic waves first proposed decades ago by a Swedish scientist. Using a 20-inch optical telescope, an X-ray telescope and a...
With NASA now actively planning for the day when astronauts will live for months on the moon or make the years-long flight to Mars and back, a potentially troublesome question is being raised with increasing urgency: Is the human body -- even a well-protected human body -- capable of living in space...
As 12,000 people gathered in Bali this week to begin framing a global response to Earth's warming climate, efforts to close a deal that would slow destruction of tropical forests appear to be the best prospect for a concrete achievement from the historic assemblage.
Atrazine, the second most widely used weedkiller in the country, is showing up in some streams and rivers at levels high enough to potentially harm amphibians, fish and aquatic ecosystems, according to the findings of an extensive Environmental Protection Agency database that has not been made...
Physicians are among the most trusted professionals in America, but a new survey shows that when it comes to dealing with colleagues' mistakes or incompetence, many doctors abandon the high standards they espouse.
