Science - Top Stories latest news

Consumer-driven health plans -- hailed since their inception in 2000 as a tool to help control costs -- are resulting in members forgoing care and discontinuing drugs to treat chronic medical problems, according to two newly published studies.

Study of nearly 1,700 participants shows that keeping a food diary can double a person's weight loss. The study, which will appear in the August issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that the best predictors of weight loss were how frequently food diaries were kept and how many support sessions the participants attended. Those who kept daily food records lost twice as much weight as those who kept no records.

The deaths started in a few caves, with hibernating bats dying in place and falling in charnel heaps to the floor.

Biologists are stumped by a plague that has killed tens of thousands, and perhaps hundreds of thousands, of bats this year in Northeastern states.

The flyby of Mercury by NASA's Messenger spacecraft in January provided the first close-up look at the planet since the 1970s.

Decades after the Apollo astronauts brought the first Moon rocks back to Earth, they are still providing scientists with new secrets.

NASA has tentatively set the final space shuttle mission for May 31, 2010, four months before the shuttle fleet retires.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]Whales and dolphins were molded by evolution to glide through water. We’ve been trying to create streamlined designs ourselves for structures such as wind turbine blades. Now researchers are examining the flippers, fins and tails of our water-dwelling cousins to learn how to improve engineering designs. Dr. Frank Fish--yes, that’s really his name--from West ChesterUniversity in Pennsylvania presented this research July 8 at the Society for Experimental Biology’s annual meeting in Marseille. [More]

With just one month to go until the Olympics, Beijing's air still falls short of international standards, BBC tests suggest.

A US doctor sparks controversy by saying couples having IVF are being "misled" about the risks of twin pregnancies.