SCIENCE MAGAZINE

Facing growing public skepticism, impatient politicians, and a blogosphere rife with conspiracy theories, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday sought to bolster its case that Army scientist Bruce Ivins was the perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks by extensively discussing the scientific evidence.

Authors: Yudhijit Bhattacharjee, Martin Enserink

On page 1054 of this week's issue of Science, geoscientists argue that rock has flowed west to east beneath the Tibetan Plateau to inflate its eastern side and that the flow has been throttled by tectonic doings as far as thousands of kilometers away.

Author: Richard A. Kerr

The flat marine organism Trichoplax adhaerens barely qualifies as an animal, yet the 98 million DNA base pairs of its genome include many of the genes responsible for guiding the development of other animals' complex shapes and organs, researchers report in the 21 August issue of Nature.

Author: Elizabeth Pennisi

The Bush Administration has proposed controversial rules that would exempt many projects from what the Administration says are unnecessary reviews of their potential impact on endangered species. The plan has left environmentalists sputtering.

Author: Erik Stokstad

According to a recent survey, 60% of 128 tenure-track academic jobs advertised last year in mathematics education went unfilled. Although that may be good news for job-seekers, it's another impediment for universities trying to improve U.S. science and math education.

Author: Jeffrey Mervis

Researchers are running out of time to finish updating an important U.S. climate change model that has been hamstrung by the budget woes of its home institution, the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Author: Eli Kintisch

China is embarking on a major new effort to protect the Mogao Grottoes, a unique repository of murals and sculptures on the old Silk Road.

Author: Richard Stone

A flood of strange new substances based on ultrasmall particles is forcing researchers to reinvent toxicology.

Author: Robert F. Service

Scientists say a key document unveiled last week now enables a reconstruction of the trail that led the FBI from the deadly anthrax letters back to Bruce Ivins's lab at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

Author: Martin Enserink

Of the dozens of forecasting techniques proffered by government, academic, and private-sector climatologists, all but two are virtually worthless, according to a new study.

Author: Richard A. Kerr

"Metamaterials" that can bend visible light may be within reach, thanks to advances reported this week online in Nature and on page 930 of this issue of Science.

Author: Adrian Cho

AIDS researchers have long argued that HIV prevention and treatment efforts should go hand in hand, but they rarely do. Their fickle relationship received intense scrutiny at the XVII International AIDS Conference held in Mexico City last week.

Author: Jon Cohen

Ten years of research have yielded detailed new insights into the stunning images considered the world's oldest cave art. But questions about their age are resurfacing.

Author: Michael Balter

After forgoing theater ambitions, and despite early marriage and motherhood, Olivera Finn has risen through immunology's ranks thanks to her work on cancer vaccines.

Author: Mitch Leslie

Despite ever-rising college costs, a $4.5 billion federal aid program to lure students into science is vastly undersubscribed.

Author: Jeffrey Mervis

Taking some of the fuzziness out of climate models is revealing the uneven U.S. impact of future global warming; the most severely affected region may be emerging already.

Author: Richard A. Kerr

Did he really do it? That's the main question on the minds of many scientists this week after an Army researcher apparently close to being indicted for the worst bioterror attack in U.S. history took his own life.

Authors: Martin Enserink, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Animal-rights extremists are suspected in attacks in Santa Cruz early Saturday morning that forced one researcher and his family from their home and destroyed another researcher's car.

Author: Greg Miller

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, state regulators, and the electric power industry are struggling to come to grips with the impact of a surprise court decision last month that dismantled a major air-pollution regulation.

Author: Erik Stokstad

Some federally funded scientists are having second thoughts about working with the 21 human embryonic stem cell lines available to them under President George W. Bush's policy, following a report indicating that the cells are getting increasingly stale--not only scientifically but ethically as well.

Authors: Gretchen Vogel, Constance Holden