Russia's conflicted stance about its growing drug crisis — criticism of the West, but silence at home — seems unlikely to address the problem, and it may even have prompted a misguided and dangerous search for remedies.
In August 2007, the presidents of Afghanistan and Tajikistan walked side by side with the U.S. commerce secretary across a new $37 million concrete bridge that the Army Corps of Engineers designed to link two of Central Asia's poorest countries. Today, the bridge across the muddy waters of the Panj River is carrying much more than vegetables and timber: It's paved the way for drug traffickers to transport larger loads of Afghan heroin and opium to Central Asia and beyond to Russia and Western Europe.
California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein says she's open to the idea of having the government compete with private companies as a way to help provide health insurance to the nearly 50 million people who lack it.
We're not finished yet. Even today, scientists say that human beings are continuing to evolve as our genes respond to rapid changes in the world around us.
Scientists are baffled by one of humankind's most annoying problems - itching — an almost universal misery for which there is, as yet, no adequate explanation or treatment.
Tom Hanks' new movie, ``Angels and Demons,'' tells of a secret plot to blow up the Vatican and everyone inside it by using ``the most terrible weapon ever made'': anti-matter.
Here are some questions and answers about the science of swine flu — the H1N1 virus that's sweeping the world.
Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study of how to avoid an catastrophic collision with an asteroid after scientitsts couldn't eliminate an extremely slight chance that an asteroid called Apophis would slam into Earth in 2036. The program has spent $41 million, but now is running out of money.
About 38,000 years ago, a Neanderthal man living in what's now Croatia broke his left arm, forcing him to use his other arm for most tasks. That increased the mass and density of the bone in the upper right arm, and preserved his DNA for researchers — using a dentist's drill — to recover many millennia later.
It's a tiny molecule with a nondescript name — "p53" — but it has an awesome responsibility: preventing more than half of all human cancers. Some scientists call it the "guardian angel," "guardian of the genome," or the "dictator of life and death."
Millions of "natural killer cells" — nature's first line of defense against cancer, viruses and other infectious microbes — are on constant patrol inside your body.
Like kids taking apart a fine Swiss watch, scientists are laboring to understand what makes the biological clock that's inside every living creature tick. Many questions remain to be answered, however, such as how the clocks work at the level of individual molecules.
Scientists are testing artificial retinas that they hope can restore partial sight to people who've lost their vision to the most common causes of blindness. Retinitis pigmentosa, which ruins peripheral vision, and macular degeneration, which causes a blurred or blind spot in central vision, affect millions of people, especially the elderly.
Two centuries after Charles Darwin's birth on Feb. 12, 1809, people still argue passionately about his theory of evolution.
The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control.
Robots are gaining on us humans. Thanks to exponential increases in computer power — which is roughly doubling every two years — robots are getting smarter, more capable, more like flesh-and-blood people. Matching human skills and intelligence, however, is an enormously difficult — perhaps impossible — challenge.
That annoying kitchen pest, the fruit fly, occupies an honored place in science and medicine, despite slurs from politicians such as Sen. John McCain and his 2008 sidekick, Sarah Palin.
The world's astronomers are about to get a trio of powerful new eyes on the sky that can see better and farther than existing space telescopes.
Barack Obama called Sunday for astronauts to be sent to the moon by 2020 and then possibly to Mars, once again reversing his earlier stance in favor of scaling back the space program. The soon-to-be Democratic nominee's new space plan includes adding a shuttle mission after its planned retirement in 2010 and reestablishing the National Aeronautics and Space Council.
Four hundred years after Galileo spied craters on the moon with the world's first telescope, astronomers this year will get a windfall of new and improved telescopes of unprecedented power with which to explore the universe. To honor Galielo, astronomers have declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy to honor Galileo.
The House of Representatives on Friday voted 219 to 212 to take historic steps to reduce the heat-trapping gases building up in the atmosphere and gradually shift America to cleaner sources of energy. However, the measure is still a long way from becoming law. The Senate now will work out its own version, and the results of a planned vote there this fall are uncertain.
Thirteen people were killed and 45 were wounded when a small parked motorcycle detonated early Friday in a crowd of young men in the Bab al Sheikh neighborhood in downtown Baghdad, Iraqi police said.
A senior cleric aligned with Iran's hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called Friday for leaders of the mass protests over the country's disputed presidential election to be dealt with "mercilessly" and treated as enemies of God, a transgression meriting death.
President Barack Obama's caution on same-sex marriage and gays in the military isn't winning him much praise from frustrated gays and lesbians, who think he hasn't delivered on his campaign promises to a constituency that helped put him in the White House.
NASA is turning to private space companies to plug a worrisome five-year gap in its ability to boost astronauts into orbit and return them safely to Earth.
The Obama administration has called for closer review of mountaintop mining permits. Environmentalists said it fell far short of protecting mountain streams from having mining debris dumped in them.
The company that runs the inactive Rock Creek gold mine near Nome has agreed to pay nearly $900,000 to federal regulators for the mine's storm-water discharge violations two summers ago. It's the second largest-ever penalty involving storm-water violations at a construction site regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's northwest regional office, federal regulators said Tuesday.
Canadian companies want to turn a swath of spruce and tundra owned by Alaska Natives into one of the world's biggest gold mines.
Forget Pebble for a minute. There's another huge project gearing up in Southwest Alaska, and it would turn a swath of spruce- and tundra-covered land owned by Alaska Natives in the Yukon-Kuskokwim region into one of the world's largest gold mines.
The U.S. Supreme Court's Monday decision allowing the Kensington gold mine near Juneau, Alaska to discharge its waste into a fish-bearing lake could be the final word in the long-running dispute. But environmentalists hope that it is not.
