Running in sauna-like chambers and the sticky Texas humidity is helping athletes adjust their bodies to perform at their peak during the 2008 summer games, but smog remains a worry.

The trend toward larger brains relative to body size developed independently in isolated groups of primates, according to a new fossil analysis.

The "singing" sands of Dunhuang are no longer music to the ears of city residents, who face disappearing rivers, buried farms, dust-choked homes, and other ills.

Having mastered some of the world's most grating sounds—sirens, cell phone ringtones—a blackbird is irritating Britons with its powers of mimicry.

The number of people seeking treatment for stings has been increasing in Alaska, especially in regions farther north than where insects such as wasps are common, a new report says.

Food prices are creating a vexing dilemma in India, which is trying to cement its status as a rising economic power even as it remains home to half the world's hungry. Part of Global Food Crisis: A Special News Series.

Certain brain cells likely control memories that help animals learn not to be afraid, a finding that could lead to new drugs for anxiety disorders, experts say.

A dense and highly interconnected structure inside the human brain seems to play a vital role in communication within and between the hemispheres, a new study says.

Australian scientists are conducting field studies to track a fungal infection that has been killing Tasmanian platypuses for more than 25 years.

Milked for antivenom, Australia's king brown snakes are eating poisonous cane toads—alien amphibians that are overrunning the country.

Equipped with buttons, gadgets, and widgets, Japan's hi-tech toilets can baffle the uninitiated.

Allowing misshapen fruits and vegetables into supermarkets can ease the world food-price crisis, the European Union's farm chief says.

By dissecting the cocoa bean genome, U.S. government scientists backed by a leading candy company aim to safeguard the world's chocolate supply—and possibly make it taste better.

Extreme droughts and downpours allowed two diseases to converge and wipe out large numbers of African lions in 1994 and 2001, a new study says.

As floodwaters subside in parts of the Midwest, residents along the Mississippi River are urged to defend themselves against another hazard: mosquitoes bearing West Nile virus.