A Long-Awaited Taste of Outer Space
It might not seem like a brilliant idea, allowing a frail 65-year-old paralytic to float free from gravity aboard a rising and plunging roller-coaster stunt flight. But who's to argue with Stephen Hawking?

11 Ways to Search Without Google
I used to use dozens of search engines in the formative years of the Internet, but Google, MSN, and Yahoo have made most of those options obsolete. Many SEs have come and go in the interim, but here are 11 alternate search engines that have unique and interesting features.

Recovering Ancient Protein
Scientists have recently recovered a protein from the femur of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

Bees Vanish, and Scientists Race for Reasons
More than a quarter of the country’s 2.4 million bee colonies have been lost — tens of billions of bees, according to an estimate from the Apiary Inspectors of America.

Drinking Age Paradox
John McCardell has a theory that a way to lower the incidence of illness, mayhem and death from alcohol abuse by young people is to lower the drinking age.

Imus Is Out, But Whitey Execs Get the Last Laugh
This is an amazingly lucid and graphic article on the absurdity of the whole Don Imus hullaballoo. This article is not for the meek -- and we finally earn our catch phrase by running this one. bp

J.R.R. Tolkien Tale, Completed by Son
Six thousand years before the Fellowship of the Ring, long before anyone had even seen a Hobbit, the elves and men of Middle-earth quaked at the power of the dark lord Morgoth...

Human Sexuality Is Written in the Genes
When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Chimpanzees: Almost Human, and Sometimes Smarter
Observed in the wild and tested in captivity, chimpanzees invite comparison with humans, their close relatives.

Seeking the Keys to Sexual Desire
For researchers in the field of human sexuality, the wide variance in how people characterize sexual desire and describe its most salient features is a source of challenge and opportunity, pleasure and pain.