Scientific American Online

An asteroid circling the sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter has for the first time been shown to harbor water ice and organic compounds. Those traits had been associated with comets, which spring from colder, more distant reservoirs in the outer solar system, but not their asteroidal cousins. The finding supports the notion that asteroids could have provided early Earth with water for its oceans as well as some of the prebiotic compounds that allowed life to develop. [More]

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced a federal blessing for the controversial Cape Wind project today--clearing a path for mammoth wind turbines to be built offshore of the Massachusetts vacation destination, the first such offshore wind farm in the U.S. Given that the United Kingdom (alone) has 1 gigawatt of such offshore wind as of 2010 and Denmark has been building offshore since 1990 , you might wonder what's taken so long? After all, the project was first proposed nearly a decade ago. [More]

The U.S. electrical grid is the largest interconnected machine on Earth: 200,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines, linking thousands of generating plants to factories, homes and businesses. The National Academy of Engineering ranks it as the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. What it cannot do is support the massive shift to low-carbon power that scientists warn will be needed to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts. [More]

A rare fossil find of two young feathered theropods has revealed that these animals sprouted a much wider range of plumage as they matured than contemporary birds do. [More]

Dear EarthTalk: I work for an office equipment company selling copiers, fax machines, computers and printers. Each year new models come out making old ones obsolete. As a result, we have loads of trade-ins with nowhere to go. What can we do with this old equipment? --Jeff P., Worcester, Mass.

By Chris Baltimore

HOUSTON (Reuters) - The Coast Guard said it will start a "controlled burn" on Wednesday to battle a giant oil slick from last week's deadly offshore drilling rig explosion, as the spill threatened wide-scale coastal damage for four U.S. Gulf Coast states.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., recently unveiled the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins , the museum's new permanent exhibition on human evolution . There visitors can trace some six million years of human prehistory, from apelike creatures such as Sahelanthropus to anatomically modern Homo sapiens , from the first tool makers to the first artists. Paintings, sculptures, fossil replicas and even a few original fossils--including a Neandertal skeleton from Iraq--combine with interactive displays to bring humanity's extraordinary odyssey into full view.

View a slide show of images from the exhibition [More]

For the last few years, environmental groups have been calling for the protection of the giant Palouse earthworm ( Driloleirus americanus ), an incredibly rare species (seen only a few times in the past 110 years) that was said to be more than a meter long, smell like lilies and spit at its attackers.

But now scientists have, for the first time since the 1980s, found two live Palouse earthworms, and it looks like the legend doesn't live up to the hype.

Fourteen contestants of all shapes and sizes are vying to win U.S. EPA 's version of the televised weight-loss competition "The Biggest Loser." Each will go on a diet with online tips from the show's fitness trainer, Bob Harper. A final weigh-in will decide the contest in October.

That's where the similarities end.

When Randy Cortright of the University of Wisconsin found an aromatic fluid floating in his beaker that smelled just like gasoline, he thought he had a problem. After all, the chemical engineer wanted to make fuel from plants for the hydrogen economy that was supposed to boom about now. Instead, when he put the fluid in a chromatograph, he found it had all the hydrocarbon components of a high-octane gasoline . [More]

When you were growing up, your mother probably told you to sit up straight, because good posture helps you look confident and make a good impression. [More]

If you've ever driven up to a mountain pass, you know that the higher you climb, the colder it gets. But on clear, calm days, it can actually be colder in the valleys. That's because under high-pressure systems, cold air slides down mountain slopes and pools down below. In the Oregon Cascades, ridgeline temperatures have clocked in at 27 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than those in a valley 2,600 feet below. [More]

In the late 1990s Dirk G. Soenksen imagined a new future for pathology. At the time, pathologists often sat on telephone books to get a good view through their microscopes, yet Soenksen’s children viewed high-resolution monitors when merely playing Nintendo. “Why can’t microscopists look at computer monitors, too?” he wondered.

That question sent Soenksen on an extended journey, beginning in his garage. After 18 months of intense laboring, he emerged as the head of a newly created digital-pathology company called Aperio, which he now runs in Vista, Calif. Beyond merely moving images of diseased tissues from microscopes to computers, his technology--as well as that of other start-ups and even established health care companies--promises to make anatomical pathology, which involves the interpretation of biopsies, far more quantitative. This advance should, in turn, enhance the accuracy of diagnosing diseases and help physicians track the effectiveness of a treatment so that any needed changes can be made promptly.

Except for a smattering of neo-Social Darwinists, religious nuts and arms merchants, everyone wants world peace, right? In a truly peaceful world, nations would not just stop fighting wars; they would cut back their armies and arsenals to levels sufficient for self-defense and internal policing. [More]

The Pap test has been enormously successful at reducing cervical cancer deaths, but it can miss early signs of malignancy, allowing undetected cases to become invasive . [More]

By Mark Schrope

As oil continues to spew from the oil rig that went up in flames in the Gulf of Mexico last week, the probability of major environmental damage increases. [More]

The last time I slammed into a wall, it hurt. I'm not too fond of falling off three-story buildings, either. The laws of physics can be so unforgiving. But two weeks ago I went to choreographer Elizabeth Streb 's latest work, "Run Up Walls," in which dancers slammed into panes of glass without uttering a single expletive and dove from a truss 30 feet high as though they were flopping onto a bed. Rather than bemoan the laws of physics, Streb celebrates them. Knowing how the human body responds to impact, her dancers have figured out how to do things that seem superhuman.[break] [More]

The oceans are in trouble--overfishing has led to depletion of fish stocks around the world and has driven many species to critically endangered status . But what to do about it? [More]

Dear EarthTalk: When the plug-in Prius is released, how much electricity will it use? Will my electric bill double if my Prius is plugged in each night? Or will the increase be minimal? Also, will all this recharging put a strain on the existing electricity grid? --G. C. Marx, Colorado Springs, Colo.