News Article

By Matt McGrath   The US plans to create the world’s biggest marine protected area (MPA) in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The White House will extend an existing protected area, known as the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument. Fishing and drilling would be banned from an area that could eventually cover two …

By Phil Mercer   On the south-western coast of the world’s driest inhabited continent sits a green, vibrant city that is defying a chronic lack of rain and warming temperatures. Perth is Australia’s driest major city, yet in its central areas at least, does not feel like a place that has confronted a water crisis. …

By Joseph Castro, Space.com Contributor Four spacecraft and one ground-based observatory recorded the eruption of a powerful X-class solar flare on March 29, making it the best-observed such event in history, NASA officials say. Solar flares are powerful explosions with energies exceeding that of millions of hydrogen bombs. Never before has an X-class flare — …

By Robyn Blumner Jason Heap wants to be a chaplain and by all measures he is more than qualified. He holds masters’ degrees in Divinity and Religious History from Texas Christian University and Oxford University, respectively, and has years of experience as a teacher of Religious Education and Philosophy. Yet the U.S. Navy just rejected …

By Michelle Boorstein   The battle in the military over the rights of service members who believe in God and those who don’t continued this week with a secular advocacy group asking the Navy chaplain’s office to help overturn the Navy’s recent decision to reject a humanist chaplain. Jason Heap, a 39-year-old religion teacher and former …

By Tom Foster At first glance, the bright red shipping container that sits by the side of the road in a slum outside Johannesburg doesn’t look like something that could transform hundreds of lives. Two sliding doors open to reveal a small shop counter, behind which sit rows of canned food, toilet paper, cooking oil, …

By Michele Catanzaro, Giuliana Miranda, Lisa Palmer & Aleszu Bajak It may seem heretical to say so in the land of the beautiful game, but science in Brazil beats the World Cup — at least in a financial match-up. Government and businesses there invest some US$27 billion annually in science, technology and innovation, dwarfing the price tag for the football …

By Jeanna Bryner Earth’s most abundant mineral lies deep in the planet’s interior, sealed off from human eyes. Now, scientists for the first time have gotten a glimpse of the material in nature, enclosed inside a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite. The result: They have characterized and named the elusive mineral. The new official name, bridgmanite, was approved …

By Kelly Dickerson A treasure trove of bronze and marble statues, gold jewelry and ancient scientific instruments may be buried in sand, hundreds of feet below the Aegean Sea, and a team of explorers is going after the 2,000-year-old hoard using the most advanced diving suit ever built. Later this year, scientists and divers plan …

By Dan Vergano   Humanity’s genetic split from an ape-like ancestor came about 13 million years ago, far earlier than the long-supposed era of a common ancestor of early humans and apes, suggests a first study of chimp gene mutations. Along with shining a new genetic light on human origins, the findings published on Thursday …

By Karen Weintraub   Though one country politically, the genetics of indigenous Mexicans shows that their ancestors were very distinct groups that mixed remarkably little. A study published today in Science found more genetic isolation than expected among these populations. “You can clearly differentiate each of the native American groups one from the other,” said Carlos Bustamante, a …

By Brian Clark Howard   Chile’s government canceled a controversial plan for five dams on two of Patagonia‘s wildest rivers Tuesday, after an eight-year battle between environmentalists and developers. Chile’s Committee of Ministers overturned the environmental permits for the HidroAysén project, which would have put dams on the Baker and Pascua Rivers, flooding 5,900 hectares of …