Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from Elizabeth Grossman's  book Chasing Molecules .

Even hundreds of miles from the nearest industrial or agricultural activity, the sea ice, ocean, and Arctic plants and animals regularly yield evidence of elemental and synthetic chemical contamination. This contamination includes not only herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides--chemicals that are used in open air, may have washed directly into rivers or are released from factories--but also metals, among them mercury as well as flame retardants and water repellants, among other substances that are, at least in theory, incorporated into the materials of the products they’re designed to enhance.

Please join the National Science Foundation (NSF) on Monday, Nov. 23, at 10 a.m. ET for a live webcast featuring Darwin-Wallace Medal recipient Mohamed Noor of Duke University, who will answer media questions about current evidence for evolution and modern evolution theory. Among the topics:

• Does modern genetic evidence favor the existence of a missing link?
• What's the single most important evolution discovery in the last 50 years?
• Is the current understanding of ...
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A television feature about growing diamonds in the lab, and a radio story that dramatizes some strange coincidences in a discussion of randomness and probability won recognition earlier this month in the 2009 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. Both programs were funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

"Diamond Factory" was produced by Julia Cort for WGBH's NOVA science NOW, and aired on public ...
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Leaf-cutter ants, which cultivate fungus for food, have many remarkable qualities.

Now there's a new one to add to the list: these ant farmers, like their human counterparts, depend on nitrogen-fixing bacteria to make their gardens grow.

The findings, reported this week in the journal Science, document a previously unknown symbiosis between ants and bacteria, and provide insights into how leaf-cutter ants have come to dominate the American tropics and ...
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The completion of a high-quality sequence of the maize (corn) genome is announced in the cover story of the November 20, 2009, issue of Science.

This new genome sequence reports the sequence of genes in maize and provides a detailed physical map of the maize genome. This map identifies the order in which genes are located along each of maize's 10 chromosomes and the physical distances between those genes.

Additional information provided by the new maize genome ...
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U.S. academic institutions awarded 48,802 research doctorate degrees in 2008, the sixth consecutive annual increase in U.S. doctoral awards and the highest number ever reported by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Survey of Earned Doctorates.

The total number of doctorates increased 1.4 percent over 2007's total of 48,112, which was the smallest annual increase during the last six years. NSF's Science Resources Statistics division compiled the survey results.

The Survey of ...
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The ocean is a potentially vast source of electric power, yet as engineers test new technologies for capturing it, the devices are plagued by battering storms, limited efficiency, and the need to be tethered to the seafloor.

Now, a team of aerospace engineers is applying the principles that keep airplanes aloft to create a new wave-energy system that is durable, extremely efficient, and can be placed anywhere in the ocean, regardless of depth.

While still in early design stages, ...
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Anyone who has ever cut down a tree is familiar with the rings radiating out from the center of a tree trunk marking the tree's age. Careful study of tree rings can offer much more: a rich record of history and indications of concerns for the future. Researchers Matthew Salzer and Malcolm Hughes of the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research and their colleagues have analyzed tree-rings from bristlecone pine trees at the highest elevations, looking for the reasons behind an ...
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The Journal of Neuroscience reports this week that musicians are better than non-musicians at recognizing speech in noisy environments.  The finding from a study conducted by neurobiologists at Northwestern University in Chicago is the first biological evidence that musicians' have a perceptual advantage for "speech-in-noise."

When tested against non-musicians, musicians demonstrated faster neural timing, enhanced representation of speech harmonics, and less ...
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Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows.

The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

Results of the research, by authors at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., Climate Central, The Weather Channel, and the National ...
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In an effort to plug gaps in knowledge about key ocean processes, the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s division of ocean sciences has awarded nearly $1 million to scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. The Scripps marine scientists will develop a new breed of ocean-probing instruments. Jules Jaffe and Peter Franks will spearhead an effort to design and deploy autonomous underwater explorers, or AUEs. AUEs will trace the fine details ...
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, as well as Senators Patty Murray, Jeff Bingaman, Kay Hagan and Ted Kaufman, were among the special guests at an Education Technology Showcase held on Capitol Hill on Nov. 4. Representatives Peter Welch and Harry Teague also attended the event, sponsored by the State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA).

The day's many hands-on activities included the opportunity to fire a t-shirt into the air through a launcher in an exhibit by the ...
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Scientists have found a population of tropical butterflies that may be on its way to splitting into two distinct species based on wing color and mate preference. In a paper published this week in the journal Science, the researchers describe the relationship between diverging color patterns in Heliconius butterflies and the long-term divergence of populations into new and distinct species.

"Evolutionary biologists grapple with the question of how speciation ...
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In the Mojave Desert winds howl across this hottest place in North America, blowing sands across Death Valley and through empty ghost towns, swirling across treeless land for hundreds of miles. But even in the otherworldly Mojave, life thrives. The Joshua tree (Yucca brevifolia), an indicator species for this desert, defines the Mojave's boundaries. In spring when the rains come, brightly colored flowers bloom in profusion--nature's paintbrush on an otherwise monotone ...
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The impact of airborne nitrogen released from the burning of fossil fuels and widespread use of fertilizers in agriculture is much greater than previously recognized, according to research results published in this week's issue of the journal Science.

It extends even to remote alpine lakes.

Examining nitrogen deposition in alpine and subalpine lakes in Colorado, Sweden and Norway, James Elser, a limnologist at Arizona State University (ASU) and colleagues found ...
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Scientists in California have discovered a new way that stars explode, in research funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The discovery hinges on an unusual explosion in the galaxy NGC 1821, roughly 160 million light years away, according to astronomer Dovi Poznanski of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Poznanski and colleagues report their discovery in a paper published today in the journal Science Express.

"Stellar explosions are some of the key ...
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Although so-called bullet trains in France can travel at speeds approaching 575 kilometers per hour, their adoption in the U.S. has been more local than express. Now, 140 years after the transcontinental railroad's nearly 2,900 kilometers of track first connected both U.S. coasts , a number of states are hoping for a second golden age of rail, this time fueled by the Obama administration's pledge of billions of stimulus dollars for high-speed railway development. [More]

When the Obama administration promised $8 billion for rail service improvements earlier this year as part of its $787-billion economic stimulus package, it opened a flood of interest in high-speed railroads, a mode of transport that has languished in the U.S. despite successes in east Asia, Europe and other parts of the world. [More]

This January, the country Turkey will join a handful of European nations that require “visual health warnings” on every pack of cigarettes. These images include things like diseased lungs and a foot sporting a toe tag. But maybe a Petri dish overrun with bacteria should make the list. Because a new study shows that cigarettes are contaminated with a bevy of nasty bugs, including some that cause disease. The report will appear in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. [More]