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While many Western retail giants have failed to translate their American success in this booming economy, Apple is winning simply by being Apple.

Drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a bacteria linked to a wide range of human diseases, are present in meat and poultry from U.S. grocery stores at unexpectedly high rates, according to a nationwide study by the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen).

The exploitation and utilization of new energy sources are considered to be among today's major challenges. Solar energy plays a central role, and its direct conversion into chemical energy, for example hydrogen generation by water splitting, is one of its interesting variants. Titanium oxide-based photocatalysis is the presently most efficient, yet little understood conversion process. In cooperation with colleagues from Germany and abroad, scientists of the KIT Institute for Functional Interfaces (IFG) have studied the basic mechanisms of photochemistry by the example of titania and have presented new detailed findings.

Coating concrete destined to rebuild America's crumbling bridges and roadways with some of the millions of tons of ash left over from burning coal could extend the life of those structures by decades, saving billions of dollars of taxpayer money, scientists reported here today at the 241st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society. They reported on a new coating material for concrete made from flyash that is hundreds of times more durable than existing coatings and costs only half as much.

The United States should plan to store spent nuclear fuel in cooling pools and concrete-and-steel casks for 100 years as it sorts out what should be done with it in the long term, according to a new study from MIT. Storing spent fuel temporarily, the study argues, is in some ways better than immediately transferring it into permanent underground storage at facilities like the proposed one at Yucca Mountain.

thanks to a research project that is the next best thing to time travel, DeJong is measuring the duck eggs in several museum collections - from the Smithsonian Institution, in this case, where Bendire was the first curator of the discipline known as oology, or the study of birds' eggs. When her project is done, DeJong will have assembled and analyzed a metrics database on perhaps 60,000 duck eggs representing at least 40 species and subspecies of ducks found in North America.

From the 1st through the 6th of February 2011, we were shooting, editing and screening an immediated autodocumentary video at the Transmediale digital art and culture festival in the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Along with events like Ars Electronica and Future Everything, Transmediale is one of the most significant media art events in Europe. We were honored to be included in the Open Zone, a space which will be open to the public, described in the festival programme as "a social experiment with different social territories that are occupied by artists and media activists". We are calling this project The Future of Art. Our goal was a short video which explores questions about the future of art, both in regard to its aesthetics, production, finance, curation, distribution and collection. In addition to conducting interviews at the festival, we were reaching out to several artists in advance of the festival over Skype. Our intention with the Skype interviewees is to extend the discourse beyond the geophysical limits of the festival by including artists who we wish could be here with us in Berlin in February.

After recently undertaking a journey to walk -- not fly -- across the United States in the "Grounded" storyline and reconnect with the country and everyday Americans, Superman appears to be taking another step that could have major implications for his national identity: in Action Comics #900... ...Superman announces that he is going to give up his U.S. citizenship. Despite very literally being an alien immigrant, Superman has long been seen as a patriotic symbol of "truth, justice, and the American way," from his embrace of traditional American ideals to the iconic red and blue of his costume. What it means to stand for the "American way" is an increasingly complicated thing, however, both in the real world and in superhero comics, whose storylines have increasingly seemed to mirror current events and deal with moral and political complexities rather than simple black and white morality.