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Following in the pad prints and rover tracks of Viking 1 and 2, Mars Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Phoenix lander became Earth’s sixth successful visitor to the surface of the Red Planet. Using a maneuver involving parachutes and rocket thrusters, the craft touched down on May 25, to the delight of NASA mission controllers and space fans everywhere. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, one of three craft currently circling Mars, spotted the lander, with its two solar panels splayed out....

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the January 2003 issue of Scientific American. Rising electricity prices and last summer’s rolling blackouts in California have focused fresh attention on nuclear power’s key role in keeping America’s lights on. Today 103 nuclear plants crank out a fifth of the nation’s total electrical output. And despite residual public misgivings over Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the industry has learned its lessons and established a solid safety record during the past decade....

As if signing books and performing surgery on patients were not enough, robots can now walk on water, too, thanks to engineers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). What started as a class project three years ago ended up as insectlike mechanical robots with four to sixteen legs. The “bugs,” two to six inches long and weighing a few grams, can scoot over water, reports IEEE Transactions on Robotics. Called STRIDE, for surface tension based robotic insect dynamic explorer, the robots use water’s surface tension to amble on their spindly legs exactly like water striders, the insects that motivated the challenge....

Move over coffee, humanity may soon have a new favorite pick-me-up. Scientists are developing brain-tinkering technologies that can not only make us more alert but fundamentally alter how we think, feel and behave. In the next few years new devices could accelerate thinking skills, improve all manner of abilities and possibly even counteract negative behaviors. And we want to know your number-one wish for brain enhancement, too—click the “Participate” button below to be part of our survey....

Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “Quiet : The Power of Introverts” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto. We live in a nation that values its extroverts – the outgoing, the lovers of crowds – but not the quiet types who change the world. She recently answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Cook: This may be a stupid question, but how do you define an introvert?...

If you read the headlines (or the obituaries), you know that heart disease, cancer, diabetes and other ailments send too many people to an early grave. But some individuals both escape those scourges and remain in good condition well past the average age of death. Just look at Robert Marchand, the French cyclist who last year beat his own world record in the 100-and-over class by riding almost 27 kilometers in one hour....

By Barbara ListonORLANDO (Reuters) - More than 1,000 migratory bottlenose dolphins have died from a measles-like virus along the U.S. Eastern Seaboard in 2013 and the epidemic shows no sign of abating, a marine biologist said on Monday.The death toll exceeds the 740 dolphins killed during the last big outbreak of the then-unknown virus in 1987-88.“It is having a significant impact and that is something we’re monitoring closely,” said Erin Fougeres, a marine mammal biologist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)....

Millions of voters this election cycle are shunning “the establishment” and the meaningless platitudes that practiced politicians chew up and spit out like bubblegum. Scientists behind a recent study have come up with a technical term for this political treacle: “bullshit.” And they’ve found that people’s ability to detect it correlates with their political views. The authors of the PLoS ONE study said they found that people who identify as conservative are more likely than their liberal counterparts to find such meaningless statements profound....

Zika virus has been grabbing headlines because of its links to an alarming birth defect called microcephaly. The data to provide evidence linking the relatively mild mosquito-borne disease and babies born with small heads and potential brain damage, however, are not yet conclusive. World Health Organization and U.S. government officials today discussed this data gap today in a series of public comments and press briefings. A top official from the U....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. This visit filled me with great pride. I was about to explore the history of my home region. The things that were happening ages ago to the place that my ancestors called home. My home city, on the banks of the Strymon river, is a very ancient settlement, dating back to the 1400’s BCE, but it only became an important town, even reaching the level of provincial capital, during the Byzantine era, especially during and after the reign of the Macedonian dynasty....

Did you like this article? Editorial Review This article has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication. The Etruscans flourished in central Italy from the 8th to 3rd century BCE, and one of their greatest legacies is the beautifully painted tombs found in many of their important towns. Tarquinia, Cerveteri, Chiusi, and Vulci, in particular, possess tombs with outstanding wall paintings which depict lively and colourful scenes from Etruscan mythology and daily life, and, sometimes, even the tomb’s occupant themselves....

1972 Surprise: Mars Volcano “Mars continues to surprise the investigators associated with Mariner 9, which has been in orbit around the planet since November 13. Perhaps the most spectacular feature is a volcanic cone at least 300 miles in diameter at the base, making it larger than any comparable feature on the earth. Close-ups of the sides of the volcano show a lineated texture almost certainly produced by the flow of lava....

Arctic wading birds lay eggs when their food supply—flies and other bugs—is most abundant. And new research shows that insects are now emerging in northeastern Greenland as much as a month earlier than a decade ago. “Since the arthropods have advanced [their springtime emergence] more than the shorebirds, one could expect the advancement to be an advantage to the birds’ reproductive success,” says biologist Toke Høye of the University of Aarhus in Denmark....

Deep in the basement archives of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children reside the patient records that cancer researcher Sam Behjati hopes will put the hospital’s past to work for the future. On May 2, he and his colleagues published the result: DNA sequences from the genomes of three childhood tumour samples collected at the facility almost a century ago. Those historic cells help to address a modern problem: the small number of tumour samples from rare cancers that are available for researchers to sequence....

When Sand City, Calif., officially opens the spigot to the state’s first full-scale seawater desalination facility Wednesday, residents throughout the city will begin tapping into the Pacific Ocean as a source of drinking water. The city’s goal is to provide a seamless transition so that consumers do not recognize any difference in quality or taste compared with the reservoir water that used to provide their potable water. Although the plant has been operating for testing purposes for more than a year, it is now fully permitted by the California Department of Public Health and can be connected directly to California-American Water Company’s (Cal-Am) water grid serving much of the Monterey Peninsula....

At the request of three Congresswomen the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has launched an investigation into whether gender bias is influencing the awarding of research grants, which would be illegal under US law. There is evidence of gender disparity in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) research at US universities and 4 year colleges—women hold only 35% of all tenured and tenure-track positions and 17% of full professor positions in Stem fields....

Web searching is catching up to e-mail as the primary activity for U.S. Internet surfers, according to a recent Pew Internet & American Life tracking survey. Number of Americans who use the Internet every day: 94 million Number who read or wrote e-mail on an average day in: June 2004: 57 million September 2005: 74 million Percent increase: 29.8 Number who used search engines in: June 2004: 38 million September 2005: 59 million...

Mark Oppenheimer, a part-time stay-at-home father of two young girls, is used to stares. “When I’m walking down the street with one baby strapped to my chest and the other in a stroller—and the kids all look happy—and I walk by a group of mothers, they’re just blown away,” he says. “The easiest way in the world to get a smile is to be a man with a baby.” Fatherhood has undergone a profound change in the past half a century....

How does the brain react to a romantic breakup? —Chelsea Brennan, Minneapolis Xiaomeng (Mona) Xu, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University and at the Miriam Hospital, responds: You’re in the midst of a breakup and feel like a different person. You find yourself spending a lot of time longing for your ex, constantly checking her Facebook updates, and wondering what went wrong. This shift in patterns of thought and behavior may be caused by neural changes that occur after a breakup....

One of the most surprising discoveries in the field of immunology is the finding that cells build structures—called inflammasomes—to launch the process of inflammation. Then within 24 hours or so of an infection or injury, they start to take these structures apart. “Imagine assembling a factory in a few minutes when a product is needed and then breaking it down once the need has passed, and you get the picture,” Wajahat Z....