Scientific American Online

Craig Venter is the Lady Gaga of science. Like her, he is a drama queen, an over-the-top performance artist with a genius for self-promotion. Hype is what Craig Venter does, and he does it extremely well, whether touting the decoding of his own genome several years ago or his construction of a hybrid bacterium this year. In a typical Venter touch sections of the bacterium's DNA translate into portentous quotes, such as this one from James Joyce: "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, and to re-create life out of life."

So I don't fault Venter for hyping his recent achievement, but I do fault others who should know better, such as the bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "What seemed to be an intractable puzzle, with significant religious overtones, has been solved," Caplan proclaims on this Web site . Venter and his colleagues have "created a novel life-form from man-made parts." Caplan warns that "this hugely powerful technology does need oversight" (no doubt by bioethicists like Caplan).

As forests in tropical nations are cleared to make way for large-scale agricultural plots, U.S. farmers may be taking a hit to their wallets.

A new report issued by the National Farmers Union and Avoided Deforestation Partners yesterday finds that hundreds of billions of dollars are lost when forestlands are converted into croplands or cattle feeding grounds. The foreign timber, beef, soy and grain that flood the U.S. market from those fields undercut domestic goods, leading to price hikes, the report warns.

MIAMI--In very rough terms, the sun's activity ebbs and flows in an 11-year cycle, with flares, coronal mass ejections and other energetic phenomena peaking at what is called solar maximum and bottoming out at solar minimum. Sunspots, markers of magnetic activity on the sun's surface, provide a visual proxy to mark the cycle's evolution, appearing in droves at maximum and all but disappearing at minimum. But the behavior of our host star is not as predictable as all that--the most recent solar minimum was surprisingly deep and long, finally bottoming out around late 2008 or so. [More]

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The eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are in many ways the Cinderella of international development. When 160 world leaders met at the United Nations in September 2000, they were inspired to adopt the Millennium Declaration, including bold targets in the fight against poverty, disease and hunger (learn more online at www.un.org/millenniumgoals ). Such declarations are usually photo ops and little more. The MDGs, however, have become the belle of the ball. With an upcoming MDG Summit this September on their 10th anniversary, the MDGs can become the historic fulcrum for eliminating extreme poverty.

Two U.N. secretaries-general, Kofi Annan, who introduced the goals, and Ban Ki-moon, who energetically leads the fight for them today, have ensured that the goals embody the international commitment to banish life-and-death poverty. Global efforts are often weak and disorganized, but the MDGs are so straightforward, bold, practical and compelling--and with the legitimacy of universal endorsement by U.N. member states--that they have become the organizing principles of development programs in poor countries, assistance strategies of donor countries, and operational strategies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) around the world.

Rare tropical orchids can be few and far between in the wild, often separated by spotty landscape and human-made obstacles. But powerful tropical orchid bees do the leg--or wing--work, flying great distances to pollinate isolated flowers and keep the flora gene pool fresh. [More]

By Chris Baltimore and Tom Bergin

HOUSTON (Reuters) - BP Plc launched an ambitious deep sea operation to choke off a gushing oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, but President Barack Obama cautioned Americans there was no guarantee it would work.

By Natasha Gilbert

Two new forms of a devastating wheat fungus, known as Ug99 stem rust, have shown up in South Africa, a study has found.

The two South African forms are able to overcome the effects of two resistance genes in wheat that normally prevent stem rust from taking hold. [More]

By Sharon Weinberger

In August 2009, Nicholas George, a 22-year-old student at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., was going through a checkpoint at Philadelphia International Airport when he was pulled aside for questioning. [More]

A bird from the Indian Ocean island of Madagascar called the Alaotra grebe ( Tachybaptus rufolavatus ) has been declared extinct by conservation group BirdLife International. BirdLife contributed to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species with a major update on the world's bird species, which was released on Wednesday.

The grebe, previously found only on Lake Alaotra in eastern Madagascar, was driven to extinction in part by the introduction of snakehead murrel, a carnivorous fish, to the area. Fishermen's modern nylon gillnets, which caught and drowned the birds, also contributed to their demise. The bird was incapable of long flights, so it had a limited range and was vulnerable to attack.

The virtues of exercise are myriad: better cardiovascular health, decreased risk for diabetes, boosted mood, and even perhaps a leaner physique. But aside from such macro links and knowledge about the heart rates, blood–oxygen levels and hormonal responses related to exercise, scientists have a relatively cursory understanding of the chemical mechanisms at work in the body during and after physical activity . [More]

MIAMI--To avoid Armageddon, we may have to invoke Armageddon . You know, the Bruce Willis version. [More]

Every year hundreds if not thousands of new species are described for the first time by science. And every year, the International Institute for Species Exploration (IISE) takes a look at the previous year's new species and picks the "Top 10 New Species".

This year's list --containing species first found in 2009--contains some doozies: a bug-eating slug, an electric fish, a "far-out frogfish" and several other fun and weird creatures .

Some 100 million to 65 million years ago, when Europe was an island archipelago, a small horned dinosaur roamed what is now Hungary. Fossil remains from this tiny dinosaur represent the first ceratopsian found in Europe and shed new light on the distribution and movement of dinosaurs during that period. It is described online May 26 in Nature ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group). [More]

MIAMI--Observations from NASA space telescopes have revealed new quirks about the supermassive black holes at the heart of two galaxies. In the supersize elliptical galaxy M87 some 55 million light-years away, for one, the black hole is not in the galaxy's center of mass, apparently having been pushed askew by some violent process. And in the Andromeda Galaxy, a neighbor to our own Milky Way just 2.5 million light-years away, the black hole appears to have recently--and very suddenly--awoken from a slumber. Two groups presented the black-hole findings Tuesday at the semiannual meeting of the American Astronomical Society being held here this week. [More]

Data visualization is something of a cottage industry these days--witness Edward Tufte, an emeritus professor of political science at Yale University, who has built a mini empire founded on his well-received books, which bear titles like Visual Explanations; Envisioning Information; and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information . In addition to leading one-day courses and securing a recent presidential appointment to an advisory panel relating to accountability in the economic recovery package, Tufte is, according to his Web site , opening a gallery, ET Modern, in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood. [More]

The search for new drugs that can reverse the course of Alzheimer's has frustrated pharmaceutical companies, with several failures reported in recent years. Research advances have arrived, not in the form of new drugs but, rather, in technologies that track the underlying biology of the disease before the first symptoms appear. [More]

Global carbon dioxide emissions will increase 43 percent by 2035 if major nations remain tied to existing energy policies and do not act to curb global warming, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration .

EIA, in its 2010 long-term global energy analysis, predicts oil prices will hover around $133 a barrel in 2035 and energy use will increase 49 percent between 2007 and 2035. Most of that new energy consumption will be out of China, India and other developing countries as they churn out steel, build more power plants and drive more cars.

What do a carnivorous sponge, a lobular yam and a flat-faced psychedelic frogfish all have in common? They’re among the Top 10 Species first described in 2009. That’s according the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. [ http://species.asu.edu/Top10 ] [More]

The victim of a car accident can require as many as 100 pints of blood--that's blood from 100 generous donors across the country, meticulously matched for blood type and screened for diseases. More than 38,000 blood donations are needed daily in the U.S., but only 38 percent of Americans are eligible to donate blood, and of those, only 8 percent actually do. [More]