In its idealized form, science resembles a championship boxing match. Theories square off, each vying for the gold belt engraved with “Truth.” Under the stern eyes of a host of referees, one theory triumphs by best explaining available evidence — at least until the next bout. But in the real world, science sometimes works more like a fashion show. Researchers clothe plausible ... 05.16.13 | more >>

James Porto/Getty Images, James Group Studios/iStockphoto, adapted by S. Egts

When chemists Richard Marshall and Earl Kooi started fiddling with cornstarch, the powder made from the dense insides of corn kernels, their intention was to turn glucose, which is easily produced from the starch, into fructose, which is sweeter. The idea wasn’t that far-fetched. The two sugar molecules are cousins, both made from the same atomic parts slightly rearranged. 05.16.13 | more >>

Carolyn Sewell

Daniel Lathrop spent seven years and $2 million building the stainless steel sphere in his laboratory. It’s two spheres, actually — nestled one within the other like a pair of Russian dolls. Only these dolls contain 12 tons of molten metal and spin independently at astonishing speeds. 05.02.13 | more >>

Santiago Andrés Triana

Steve Haddock remembers every detail about his first ocean encounter with a comb jelly. The open water was a bottomless deep blue. The animal, about the size of a tennis ball, shimmered with bioluminescence. “It was just cruising along like a hover craft,” says Haddock, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif. “Comb jellies are more alien ... 05.02.13 | more >>

Clockwise from top left: L.L. Moroz & M. Citarella/Univ. of Florida; Dimijian Greg/Getty Images; © Ingo Arndt/Minden Pictures/Corbis; Boris Pamikov/Shutterstock; Dimijian Greg/Getty Images; Casey Dunn/Brown Univ.

Here’s a climate puzzle — one that goes back to Earth’s infancy some 4.5 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. The sun was much dimmer back then. Far less solar radiation reached the planet. Earth should have been a frozen wasteland. But all geologic signs point to a young planet awash in liquid water, with the first life-forms emerging. Scientists call this conundrum the “faint young sun ... 04.18.13 | more >>

Nicolle Rager Fuller

Zola the crow is about to face a test that has baffled animals from canaries to dogs.

She’s a wild New Caledonian crow, and for the first time, she’s seeing a tidbit of meat dangling on a long string tied to a stick. She perches on the stick, bends down, grabs the string with her beak and pulls. But the string is too long. The meat still hangs out of reach. 04.18.13 | more >>

Mick Sibley/Univ. of Auckland

Brain research has been on a lot of minds lately in the nation’s capital. After offering a brief shout-out to Alzheimer’s research in his February State of the Union address, President Barack Obama went a step further in April by announcing a decade-long effort to develop advanced tools for tracking human brain activity. The administration dubbed it the Brain Research through Advancing ... 04.18.13 | more >>

Laboratory of Neuro Imaging/UCLA

If all goes according to Mike Dunne’s plan, the United States will build its first nuclear fusion power plant by the end of the next decade. Sixteen times a second, as the National Ignition Facility's program director for laser fusion energy envisions it, a two-millimeter-wide capsule of cryogenic hydrogen will drop into a steel chamber and get zapped by a 384-beam laser. Matter will ... 04.04.13 | more >>

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

There are two vaccines that guard against human papilloma­virus, and they are in rare company among medical inventions — the vaccines prevent cancer. Only the hepatitis B vaccine can make the same claim. Cancer-causing HPV can trigger abnormal cell growth on the cervix, and cervical cancer still kills up to 4,000 U.S. women each year. The virus is also implicated in cancers occurring in the ... 04.04.13 | more >>

© Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters/Corbis

MCMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA — Even when the December sun beats down 24 hours a day, most of Antarctica remains cold, if not brutally frigid. With one dramatic exception. Wind-blown clouds of steam rise year-round from a lava lake atop Mount Erebus, the planet’s southernmost active volcano. 03.20.13 | more >>

George Steinmetz/Corbis

Like many women with parents of the Mad Men generation, Susan Murphy grew up in a household full of cigarette smoke. Both dad and mom smoked heavily, even while Murphy was still in her mother’s womb. 03.20.13 | more >>

Bobbieo/Getty Images

Herb Dragert didn’t know what to make of his wayward station.

In the early days of GPS satellites, Dragert had set up four benchmarks in the bedrock of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to watch how their positions changed over time. Maybe, he thought, he could capture the ground moving during the earthquakes that occasionally shake the Pacific Northwest. 03.07.13 | more >>

Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array/Central Washington Univ.

It looked like a lost cause: a 61-year-old patient with advanced pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest diagnoses. Ordinarily, doctors wouldn’t have much choice. They could try chemotherapy drugs one at a time to see if any worked, or they could slam the tumor with a cocktail of chemicals that had shown some success with similar cases. 03.07.13 | more >>

Mary Calvert/The New York Times/Redux Pictures

Daisy Martin didn’t seem sick. Come dinnertime, she was as ravenous as ever. And at the sight of a new toy, she danced around in excited circles, same as always. Then one day, when Daisy was 8 years old, one of her family members noticed a lump, and then others, on the side of Daisy’s neck, beneath her fur. The diagnosis was devastating: T-cell lymphoma, a cancer so merciless that ... 02.21.13 | more >>

Elke Vogelsang/Getty Images

Joshua Pearce takes unusual satisfaction in strolling through Walmart. The shelves laden with toys, household items, tools and clothing inspire in him a certain smugness, a pride in American entrepreneurship. But it’s not because Pearce admires the chain as an empire built by a self-made man. Pearce swells with pride at Walmart because the store is full of mass-manufactured objects that he ... 02.20.13 | more >>

Eva Kolenko/3D Systems

Psychiatry seemed poised on the edge of a breakthrough. In early 2011, after decades of no radically new drugs, a fundamentally different schizophrenia treatment promised relief from the psychotic hallucinations and delusions plaguing people with the disease. The new compound, devised by chemists at Eli Lilly and Co., hit a target in the brain that older medicines had ignored. 02.07.13 | more >>

Michael Morgenstern

It started with droughts in Australia and Ukraine. Wheat yields dropped and countries clamped down on grain exports. With a hungry biofuel market also gobbling up corn, the cost of food soared. 02.07.13 | more >>

Heydenkaye/Istockphoto

Richard Kriwacki refused to give up on his protein. He had tried again and again to determine its three-dimensional shape, but in every experiment, the protein looked no more structured than a piece of cooked spaghetti. 01.24.13 | more >>

P. Tompa/Trends in Biochemical Sciences 2012

Rogers Hornsby, one of the best hitters ever to swing a baseball bat, had a reputation for being standoffish. Teammates complained that he didn’t socialize, even balking at attending movies — prime entertainment during the 1920s. Sitting in a dark theater watching a bright screen made it difficult to hit a baseball, Hornsby used to say. Hard to argue with a guy who reportedly had terrific ... 01.24.13 | more >>

Joey Celis/Getty Images

Photographer Bill Wallauer was following a group of chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park one March day when a young female caught his eye. She had climbed a tree, inserted a thin, peeled branch into a hole and was fishing out carpenter ants. Wallauer, of the Jane Goodall Institute, took out his video camera and filmed the chimp as she slurped up insects for several minutes. 01.24.13 | more >>

R.C. O’Malley

Imagining tiny creatures infiltrating human brains is creepy enough. But Marion Vittecoq knows she has been invaded. Her inner companions may be just hanging out — or they may be subtly changing her personality, manipulating her behavior or altering her risk of disease. Yet she doesn’t sound particularly upset. 01.10.13 | more >>

Jitender P. Dubey, CDC