Space shuttle Atlantis blasted off Monday afternoon from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, beginning an 11-day mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The orbiter's six-member crew will deliver some 13 metric tons of parts to the station as NASA wraps up its final scheduled shuttle launches and seeks to complete construction of the station. After Atlantis 's mission, designated STS-129 , only five planned shuttle launches remain. And today's launch marks the start of the last shuttle mission for 2009. [More]

For sports fans watching their favorite team play, the greatest enjoyment comes only with a strong dollop of fear and maybe even near-despair, a new study suggests. Researchers studied fans of two college football teams as they watched the teams' annual rivalry game on television. They found that fans of the winning team who, at some point during the game, were almost certain their team would lose, ended up thinking the game was the most thrilling and suspenseful.

Scientists have developed a new approach to studying how immune cells chase down bacteria in our bodies. They used holographic optical tweezers to guide "artificial bacteria" -- microparticles that mimic bacteria by giving off a chemical "scent," stimulating immune cells to respond. By controlling the chemical patterns produced, they were able to study how immune cells respond to and interact with these chemical signals.

Pooling results from 21 studies, involving 622,381 men and women, researchers have affirmed that migraine headaches are associated with more than twofold higher chances of the most common kind of stroke: those occurring when blood supply to the brain is suddenly cut off by the buildup of plaque or a blood clot.

When a woman becomes infected with chlamydia, the first white blood cells that arrive at the scene to fight the infection are not the most effective. This discovery could pave the way for the relatively rapid development of a vaccine against chlamydia.

Most of the linguistic functions in humans are controlled by the left cerebral hemisphere. A new study of captive chimpanzees suggests that this "hemispheric lateralization" for language may have its evolutionary roots in the gestural communication of our common ancestors. A large majority of the chimpanzees in the study showed a significant bias towards right-handed gestures when communicating, which may reflect a similar dominance of the left hemisphere for communication in chimpanzees as that seen for language functions in humans.

Scientists have developed a simple, cheap, accurate test to find undetected landmines.

For most of May Chris Darimont, an environmental scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz , poured liters of fermented cattle blood mixed with pureed rotten fish guts on 3,000 square kilometers of British Columbia's coastal wilderness. [More]

NFL players and other athletes who suffer serious or multiple concussions may benefit from ground-breaking new research. Scientists are developing a surgical technique that involves hypothermia in specific regions of the brain.

A study of 145 preschool children reports, for the first time, that when the concentrations of two common phthalates in mothers' prenatal urine are elevated their sons are less likely to play with male-typical toys and games, such as trucks and play fighting.