ScienceNOW

A new study suggests that we mentally alter politicians' skin tones to match how we feel about them. When presented with three photos of President Barack Obama and asked to choose which was most representative of him, liberals tended to pick a shot in which his skin had been digitally lightened, whe...

The first protons collided in the Large Hadron Collider today at CERN outside Geneva, Switzerland. The four largest detectors at the LHC all recorded candidate collision events. Scientists at CERN, throughout the United States, and around the world celebrated the news.

If you ever took a chemistry lab class in college, chances are you once stared desperately at a flask of liquid, crossing your fingers for tiny crystals to appear. Your lab instructor may have offered advice that sounded like voodoo: "Scratch the inside of the flask to make the crystal grow." But th...

Those spare nickels in your pocket might not be there without the help of ancient volcanoes that blasted sulfur dioxide into the sky billions of years ago. The discovery solves a mystery that has dogged researchers for decades, says geochemist Edward Ripley of Indiana University, Bloomington, who wa...

Tropical leaf-cutter ants can't eat without a little help from their microbial friends. The insects drag inedible leaves into their massive subterranean lairs, where "gardens" of fungi break them down into a palatable, spongy white material. Meanwhile, bacteria keep the fungi healthy by secreting an...

Genital herpes comes and goes--at least that's what it looks like to patients. But a mathematical model published in the 18 November issue of Science Translational Medicine suggests that herpes never slumbers. Instead, nerve cells continuously pump out the virus in minuscule quantities over a suffer...

A group of researchers is proposing a radical approach to halt the HIV/AIDS epidemic: Go on a spending spree. Pouring more than $60 billion into treatment, massive prevention campaigns, and condom distribution over the next 5 years—instead of slowly doling out the money over 2 decades, as is current...

Pharaohs and their followers were revered as something close to gods, but their hearts were all too human. Cardiologists and Egyptologists have discovered strong evidence of cardiovascular disease in mummies dating as far back as 1530 B.C.E., indicating that heart troubles are not just a curse of mo...

Every day, millions of people in Bangladesh drink poisoned water. Wells all over the country tap into shallow aquifers with high concentrations of arsenic. Now researchers report that they've figured out the cause of this contamination.

The death of massive stars is reasonably well known--most blow their innards across galaxies in titanic explosions called supernovae--but their birth is another story. Solar giants are relatively rare, and they form inside giant clouds of gas and dust that block the view of optical telescopes.