It's just past midnight and a Vienna rave is at full-throttle, packed with sweaty dancers pulsing to an electronic beat.

Anyone can buy naming rights to a star, but Gary and Linda Dower are hoping to pick up their very own observatory.

The Institute of Primate Research, in the Ololua forest about 20 kilometers outside the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, has been in operation since it was founded by the archaeologist Louis Leakey in 1960.

A century before Ebola, SARS, or avian flu began making head-lines, another invisible killer was carving a swath of death and fear across the Russian Empire: the plague.

Jack London once said that he would "rather be ashes than dust."

The scientists were already massing when I arrived at Bronx River Forest on a steamy June morning.

Thank you, members of Congress, for the opportunity to address you at this hearing today.

If you were a small business owner looking for a loan, you'd expect financial and perhaps accounting advice from your banker.

On a recent visit to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, the witch hazel was just beginning to bloom, the magnolia trees were budding, but in the herbarium staging area, it was still spring training.

Premieres on PBS, April 17.

If you thought the hard work of sequencing the human genome was complete, think again.

, a recent film about Hughes' early career.

One summer in the late 1980s, Yuri Lazebnik needed to sort some cells.

It's been six years since human embryonic stem cells appeared on the public radar screen, and we still don't know what to call them.

Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl's 1957 demonstration of DNA replication is considered "the most beautiful experiment in biology."

Scientific terminology is intentionally precise: One would not confuse a peptide with a peptidase, or DNA with RNA.Unfortunately, the public has been slow to embrace the word "genome" because of a continuing confusion with the term "genetic code" that is perpetuated by editors, writers, and even a few prominent scientists.The dictionary defines "code" as "a system of signals used to represent letters or numbers in transmitting messages." Substitute "amino acids" for "letters or numbers" and you

A few weeks ago I spotted, in someone's trash, Isaac Asimov's science fiction classic, The Foundation Trilogy. Shortly after, I found the 1954 giant-ants-in-L.A. film, Them, in a discount store video bin. Garbage to some, these tales were once treasures to me, although I prefer science fiction more subtle than the formulaic doomsday scenarios of humanity succumbing to oversized or overabundant (a) birds, (b) mind-snatching seed pods, (c) blobs, and of course (d) ants. The humans always prevail.T

Normal people collect stamps and coins, CDs and concert tees. Some biologists with a zoological bent, like myself, collect roadkill, originally dubbed "road fauna" in 1938 by James Simmons in his book Feathers and Fur on the Turnpike. Is there no one besides me who relishes stopping to explore a freshly splayed digestive tract, or marveled at the unique aroma of squished annelids driven from their underground lairs by rain?Roadkill finds often come unexpectedly. I move most away from traffic, so

Taxation of fat, an idea that has been kicked around on both sides of the Atlantic for a few years, has suddenly been elevated to the forefront of government consciousness in the United Kingdom. The premise, which is dubious at best, is that a fat tax might make the population healthier and happier, and simultaneously reduce the financial burden of healthcare. Here I examine this compulsion to legislate the populace towards health. Can it possibly be good for us?PROBLEM 1The confusion of a mixed

For decades, the behavioral sciences have been at a dramatic disadvantage to the hard sciences. When a biologist hypothesizes that the addition of a particular ligand to a cell will cause a certain gene to turn on and thus produce a certain protein, all she has to do is to introduce the enzyme and then test for the protein. If it's there, she publishes a paper; if it's not, she quietly discards the work.The psychologist has a much steeper hill to climb. Let's say he's trying to prove his hypothe