Great whales, such as humpbacks, in theory are protected by an International Whaling Commission moratorium on commercial whaling. The commission, which begins its 60th meeting today, has been roiled by debate over whether to continue the moratorium.

By watching nerve cells in the brain, a team monitors changes in the connections between nerve cells from the brain stem (stained yellow in image) of a living mouse and nerve cells near the salivary gland (stained blue). If one cell drops communication, the connection eventually breaks.

Before and after photos suggest that ice is on Mars. These Mars Phoenix Lander images are from a trench in the Martian northern plains. Lumps are visible in the lower left corner of the left image. In the right image (taken four days later), the lumps are gone. Scientists think the chunks disappeared through a process similar to evaporation, supporting the idea that they were ice, rather than salt.

A person’s breath is more than 99 percent water — and then a cocktail of many other molecules. Scientists are working to understand how the amounts of various molecules can serve as markers for some diseases, such as lung cancer.

A first study of its kind examines how the ratio of boys to girls in preschool classes affects children’s development. It finds that boys do well in majority-girl classes but not in majority-boy classes.

Scientists working at the North Greenland Icecore Project drilling site found evidence in ice that past abrupt climate changes happened in just one to three years.

In a gas that’s cold enough, the wavelets of matter we call atoms become long and shallow, lose their individuality and blend into one. At least, that’s what happens in a state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate. This computer simulation shows a pancake-shaped BEC cloud kept inside an electromagnetic trap and initially (upper left) divided into three parts. Removing the partitions unleashes three matter waves, which collide and interfere with one another (upper right). A honeycomb array of vortices appears for a few milliseconds (bottom left) before the orderly pattern breaks up i...

In this simulation of a Bose-Einstein condensate, each vortex rotates in the opposite direction (shown by arrows) as its neighbors, just like a cogwheel rotates clockwise if it’s interlocked with one that’s rotating counterclockwise. Initially observed in experiments, such vortices have been theorized to form from random quantum fluctuations. The new simulation suggests that vortices can form without such fluctuations; instead, they may arise from the interactions of the matter waves, Gary Ruben and his colleagues at Monash University in Australia write in an upcoming Physical Review A. -...

A Pirahã man participates in a new experiment that, researchers say, indicates that his language contains no number words, even for the number one.

As a female chimp nears ovulation, her rump enlarges. Such signs told researchers which chimps to follow when trying to record females’ calls during sex.

Scientists found that green beads (like the ones shown) emerged in large numbers with agriculture some 11,000 years ago.

An artist's depiction of three new exoplanets orbiting a star called HD 40307.

In 2002, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope captured data for this composite image of the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star the size of Manhattan. The pulsar is the brightest spot in the center of the Crab Nebula shown here. Since then, scientists have searched for any emission of gravitational waves but haven't detected any so far.

Archaeobotanist Mordechai Kislev holds ancient date palm seeds (Phoenix dactylifera L.) from Masada (left). The 7.5-month-old sapling (right) grew from one of those seeds. Some early leaves had white patches, perhaps resulting from a lack of chlorophyll.

In this map of the cosmic microwave background, red and blue represent temperature variations in the radiation and show a slight asymmetry, with more temperature variation on the left half of the sky than the right.