Science

Writer and astrophysicist Adam Frank says: Make friends with science, and the ordinary, everyday stuff will transform into the extraordinary. Now look around you — the mail, the kids' toys, the mess on your desk, the constant daily chaos? It's inevitable, and science proves it.

The first time nature writer Jackson Landers spotted a black widow spider on his front porch, he was transfixed. He grew curious about the spiders and kept one for months as a pet. One day, he got bit.

Under the proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency, new plants that run on coal would be permitted to emit only about half as much carbon dioxide as the average coal plant puts into the air today. Emissions from the electricity industry are already declining as utilities turn to natural gas and wind farms.

Brazil's Atlantic Forest, home to the golden lion tamarin, was once a massive ecosystem stretching along the Brazilian coast. But centuries of human activity have encroached upon the forest, leaving the future of this tiny, lion-maned monkey in doubt.

One of the really big challenges facing our world is how to grow more food without using up the globe's land and water. One company in Ohio says we've been ignoring one solution: insects. It's using larvae of the black soldier fly to convert waste into feed for fish or pigs.

The 2013 America's Cup isn't just about speed demons racing faster than the wind. These days, the 162-year-old international sailing competition is being powered by supercomputers. Tech teams are crunching the numbers to make small changes that mean a big difference in speed.

Some scientists have argued that so much gas leaks out during production that it is actually worse for the environment than coal. But a new nationwide study shows that methane leaks from natural gas production aren't as bad as some feared.

For decades, DNA has been used to identify victims of crime, even victims of war crimes. But there's no international standard for using DNA analysis for identifying bodies after a disaster. So some scholars are calling for an international group with the same reach as weapons inspectors.

For the past couple of years, NASA has been using remotely piloted aircraft to study hurricanes. And they are turning up new information about things like how dust from Africa can determine whether weather systems become hurricanes in the Atlantic.

Planthoppers are champion jumpers — launching themselves upward, hundreds of times their own height, in just a couple of milliseconds. They achieve this feat with the help of cog-like teeth on their legs — the first mechanical gear system ever found in nature.