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When spores sent through the mail in 2001 caused 11 people to contract anthrax – ultimately killing five of them – infectious disease specialists noted that the death rate was substantially lower than the historical mortality rate, which approached 100 percent. Many assumed that access to modern intensive care units and more powerful antibiotics made the difference.

But after completing the most comprehensive review of anthrax cases ever conducted, researchers at the Veterans Aff

The tendency to use drugs depends on each individual person. Not all those who have access to drugs become addicts, therefore there may be personality characteristics that influence their use. One such characteristic is the pursuit of new sensations found in people that like looking for risk at all times. Although some studies have already suggested a link between these people and a higher probability of becoming drug addicts, shopaholics or gambling addicts, until now no study has objectively fou

Increased carbon dioxide emissions are rapidly making the world’s oceans more acidic and, if unabated, could cause a mass extinction of marine life similar to one that occurred 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared. Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology will present this research at the AGU/ASLO Ocean Sciences meeting in Honolulu, HI on Monday, Feb 20.

Caldeira’s computer models have predicted that the oceans will become far more

In the search for life on other worlds, scientists can listen for radio transmissions from stellar neighborhoods where intelligent civilizations might lurk or they can try to actually spot planets like our own in habitable zones around nearby stars.

Either approach is tricky and relies on choosing the right targets for scrutiny out of the many thousands of nearby stars in our galactic neighborhood.

Margaret Turnbull, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, ha

For scientists eying distant planets and solar systems for signs of alien activity, University of Colorado at Boulder Professor Carol Cleland suggests the first order of business is to keep an open mind.

It may be a mistake to try to define life, given such definitions are based on a single example — life on Earth, said Cleland, a philosophy professor and fellow at the NASA-funded CU-Boulder Center for Astrobiology. The best strategy is probably to develop a “general theory of

The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe’s richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground.

That’s not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil — known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths — and say it can pull substantial amounts of carbon out of the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s