With growing concerns about the effects of global warming on polar bears, it's increasingly important to understand how other environmental threats, such as mercury pollution, are affecting these magnificent Arctic animals. New research lays the groundwork for assessing current and future effects of mercury deposition and climate change on polar bears.

Stimulating the body’s own immune system to fight cancer offers new treatment opportunities for cancer patients, and scientists have made the first step towards finding existing drugs that could help.

The most detailed seismic images yet published of the Yellowstone supervolcano's plumbing shows a plume of hot and molten rock rising from the northwest at a depth of at least 410 miles, contradicting claims that there is no deep plume. A related study indicates the banana-shaped magma chamber a few miles beneath Yellowstone is 20 percent larger than believed, so a future cataclysmic eruption could be larger than thought.

A new report faults food and beverage producers for continuing to saturate television with ads for high-calorie, low-nutrient products.

Vehicles running on ethanol will generate higher concentrations of ozone than those using gasoline, especially in the winter, researchers have found. That could create new health concerns in areas where ozone hasn't been a significant problem before.

The testing of DNA from a statewide blood screening program for newborns in Wisconsin was able to identify infants with T-cell lymphopenia, a blood disorder that affects the child's immune system, a disease in which early identification is important, according to a new study.

Planet hunters have discovered as many as six low-mass planets around two nearby Sun-like stars, including two "super-Earths" with masses 5 and 7.5 times the mass of Earth. These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars, according to researchers.

"Why is it that men can be bastards and women must wear pearls and smile?" wrote author Lynn Hecht Schafran. The answer, according to a new article may lie in our interpretation of facial expressions.

Scientists are working on 3-D microprocessors cooled from the inside through channels with a liquid coolant. The method is expected to boost the performance of future computers.

Researchers have discovered a new explanation for differences in the severity of mental illness in males. The more excess copies of a certain gene, the more serious the handicap. The genetic defect is situated on the X-chromosome; and it is suspected that it is the amount of copies of the GDI1 gene that is responsible.