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Sarah Saurer was seven years old when she was diagnosed with brain cancer. Her parents soon found out that several other children in their small town -- which sat just miles away from two troubled Illinois nuclear power plants -- had been diagnosed with brain cancer and leukemia. Then news broke that one of the plants had been leaking radioactive water for years before it was detected. A quick survey by concerned mothers found that every single home within a quarter mile of the spill housed someone who'd been diagnosed with cancer. "I want to remind you how important it is to protect people from the harmful things that are being put into our environment," Sarah Saurer told the scientists, her short stature and child-like face showing little sign of her 17 years.

Daily temperature fluctuations, not just high temperatures, play a significant role in the transmission of dengue, a deadly mosquito-borne disease that strikes millions of people in tropical and subtropical countries, according to ground-breaking research led by French, Thailand and U.S. scientists and conceived by medical entomologist Thomas Scott of the University of California, Davis.

As scientists continue to be baffled over the recent decline in bee populations around the world, a new model developed by Dr Andrew Barron at Macquarie University in collaboration with David Khoury and Dr Mary Myerscough at the University of Sydney, might hold some of the answers to predicting bee populations at risk.

Melting glaciers and ice caps on Canadian Arctic islands play a much greater role in sea level rise than scientists previously thought, according to a new study led by a University of Michigan researcher.

Zooniverse volunteers, who call themselves "Zooites," are working on a project called Galaxy Zoo, classifying distant galaxies imaged by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. "Not only are people better than computers at detecting the subtleties that differentiate galaxies, they can do things computers can't do, like spot things that just look interesting," explains Zooniverse director Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford.

In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers and scientists show that the gains that have been made in stabilizing CO2 emissions in developed or "rich" countries since the signing of the Kyoto agreement, have been neutralized by the increase in CO2 emissions from developing nations as they produce goods for trade, primarily to developed countries. Because of this disparity, many groups are calling for a change to the Kyoto agreement practice of only counting CO2 emissions that are produced in-country, rather than the CO2 footprint of those products that are consumed.

Scientists have observed a "super-aggregation" of more than 300 humpback whales gorging on the largest swarm of Antarctic krill seen in more than 20 years in bays along the Western Antarctic Peninsula.

The Agulhas Current which runs along the east coast of Africa may not be as well known as its counterpart in the Atlantic, the Gulf Stream, but researchers are now taking a much closer look at this current and its "leakage" from the Indian Ocean into the Atlantic Ocean. In a study published in the journal Nature, April 27, a global team of scientists led by University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine & Atmospheric Science Associate Professor Lisa Beal, suggests that Agulhas Leakage could be a significant player in global climate variability.

The concept of time as a way to measure the duration of events is not only deeply intuitive, it also plays an important role in our mathematical descriptions of physical systems. For instance, we define an object's speed as its displacement per a given time. But some researchers theorize that this Newtonian idea of time as an absolute quantity that flows on its own, along with the idea that time is the fourth dimension of spacetime, are incorrect. They propose to replace these concepts of time with a view that corresponds more accurately to the physical world: time as a measure of the numerical order of change.

Using simple robots to simulate genetic evolution over hundreds of generations, Swiss scientists provide quantitative proof of kin selection and shed light on one of the most enduring puzzles in biology: Why do most social animals, including humans, go out of their way to help each other? In next week's issue of the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, EPFL robotics professor Dario Floreano teams up with University of Lausanne biologist Laurent Keller to weigh in on the oft-debated question of the evolution of altruism genes.

The health of the world's oceans is declining much faster than originally thought - under siege from pollution, overfishing and other man-made problems all at once - scientists say in a new report.

Is it possible that your child could live to see 150 years of age? What about your grandchild living to see their 1000th birthday? According to a British biomedical gerontologist and chief scientist of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) Foundation Aubrey De Grey, that is a definite possibility.

Greenland's ice sheet melted the most it has in over a half century last year, US government scientists said Tuesday in one of a series of "unmistakable" signs of climate change.

alf the elephants from West and Central African savannahs have vanished in the past 40 years, scientists report in PLoS One.

IN JUST a few thousand years, we humans have created a remarkable civilisation: cities, transport networks, governments, vast economies full of specialised labour and a host of cultural trappings. It all just about works, but it's hardly a model of rational design - instead, people in each generation have done the best they could with what they inherited from their predecessors. As a result, we've ended up trapped in what, in retrospect, look like mistakes. What sensible engineer, for example, would build a sprawling, low-density megalopolis like Los Angeles on purpose? Suppose we could try again. Imagine that Civilisation 1.0 evaporated tomorrow, leaving us with unlimited manpower, a willing populace and - most important - all the knowledge we've accumulated about what works, what doesn't, and how we might avoid the errors we got locked into last time. If you had the chance to build Civilisation 2.0 from scratch, what would you do differently?