Feature: Climate Scientists Shine Light on Cave Ice
EISRIESENWELT, AUSTRIA—Tracing his glove along a chalky layer in a house-size block of ice that lines this cave in the Austrian Alps, Michael Behm can feel all that is left of an ancient warm spell. The ice, likely formed over the decades or centuries as calcium-enriched rainwater trickled deep into the cave and froze, must [...]

African GM safety drill
The African Union has set up a school to educate and train future regulators in genetically modified (GM) crop biosafety. The African Biosafety Network of Expertise (ABNE) was officially launched in April in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, with a five-year, $10.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This continent-wide initiative, administered by the [...]

Feature: (Stem cell) banking crisis
Like most stem cell biologists, Helen Mardon obtained her first cell lines from someone she knew. Later, when she needed more material, she chose to pay for a line from a commercial dealer. Eventually, the Oxford Stem Cell Institute co-director derived her own in-house human embryonic stem cell core from embryos donated by in vitro [...]

Mixed Drinks, Mixed Messages
One minute you’re feeling festive and the next you’re wishing you’d had one less drink. This spring, a pair of studies sent equally mixed signals about long-term alcohol consumption that might baffle even the most sober teetotaler. A survey of more than 1 million middle-aged British women linked low to moderate alcohol intake with an [...]

In The Fold
Mom wanted you to be a doctor, but you were too busy playing videogames to take the MCATs? Now is your chance to make amends. Foldit, a new online game, taps our inner competitive streak to advance a key area of medicine: the understanding of how proteins form. Proteins are the engines of cellular life—they [...]

Plants Gone Alpine
These days it seems like everyone is into fast-and-light alpine climbing, even plants. Now, according to researchers in Germany, valley plants are racing up the flanks of the Bernina Alps, Switzerland. The range is home to Piz Palu (12,812 feet) and the Biancograt (AD) on Piz Bernina (13,284 feet), the easternmost 4,000-meter peak in the Alps. [...]

Virus-resistant cassava could be available by 2015
Cassava breeds that are resistant to two major viruses could soon be available to farmers in Africa. Cassava mosaic disease and brown streak disease stunt the growth and rot the roots of crops, respectively. Mosaic disease alone destroys an estimated 35 million tonnes of African cassava a year — the difference between needing to import [...]

Feature: Braving Iceland’s Volcano
The propeller-driven six-seater churns straight toward the brown plume over Eyjafjallajökull, unlike other aircraft taking off from Reykjavík airport. Inside, accompanied by a seasoned pilot, sits Björn Oddsson, a graduate student at the University of Iceland, entrusted with an infrared sensor derived from military bombing systems. But the only bombs Oddsson talks about are the [...]

New commissioner spells new direction for EU research funding
The EU’s €50.5 billion ($69.4 billion) research framework is the biggest such fund in the world. But it is not known for being nimble, and it is underused by European businesses. Now, as the seven-year program approaches its half-time review, a change in the political lineup could lead to shifts in funding priorities that favor [...]

Tweeting The Lunar Landings
Just read Apollo 13. Forget being a fireman. I want to be an astronaut! About 13 years ago Imagine if wide-eyed kids and journalists had Twitter during the space race and in the decades after. I might have written the line above to broadcast to my friends and followers (as Twitter calls subscribers) when I [...]

Seismic “Noise”–Oil Prospecting Data Could Decipher Ocean Mixing
Three decades ago researchers discovered what are essentially enormous saltwater lakes in the Atlantic Ocean. These “lakes,” called meddies, are gently spinning lenses of water up to 100 kilometers across and one kilometer thick. They float a few hundred meters below the surface of the ocean. Such large, warm bodies, which turned out to come [...]

Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart
This past spring's eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland was a nightmare for travelers, but it gave scientists in Europe unprecedented access to a complex eruption right in their backyard.

When hasty headlines fail to shake a family tree
When a new species comes to light, its effect on the arrangement of its family tree might be better measured by statistics than by headlines. In a study of primates and flightless dinosaurs, researchers at Bristol University, UK, have found that the likelihood of any given find shaking up the family tree depends on how [...]

Collaborating with Citizen Scientists
Climbing one of the world's biggest granite walls is different from climbing trees, as National Park Service botanist Martin Hutten discovered while dangling from a cliff in the spray of Vernal Falls high above the Yosemite Valley.

Brewing a Cup of Volcanic Tea
Many families along Iceland’s fertile southern coast can spin a good yarn about a close escape from an exploding volcano. Take Kristín Vogförð’s  grandfather, who was tending sheep on the eastern slopes of Katla when it erupted in 1918, melting glacial ice and violently flooding the rivers and fields below. According to an account by the [...]

Avatar’s gaze illuminates social brain
They may seem a little unsettling but the staring eyes of this female avatar were designed to grab your gaze and hold it, and also to obligingly follow where you look. By performing these actions with people placed inside a brain scanner, she has helped to demonstrate that guiding the gazes of others activates different [...]

Brain Freeze
Some of us sing, and some of us just mouth the lyrics, but we all rely on our brain to coordinate even the simplest motor behaviors. Scientists interested in the brain activity behind motion often use birdsong as a model because certain songs are sung the same way every time, providing a naturally controlled setting [...]

Feature: Internal Waves Beneath The Sea
Seismologist W. Steven Holbrook and oceanographer Raymond Schmitt might be forgiven for talking past each other aboard a research cruise. Oceanographers normally drop probes overboard, measuring the ocean’s temperature, chemistry and motion. To seismologists, however, the ocean is in the way of their measurements: They typically tune their microphones to detect echoes from below the [...]