Science

Tell Me More has been honoring Black History Month by speaking with African-Americans who've excelled in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math. Sylvester James Gates Jr. spent his career researching string theory. He explains to host Michel Martin that, while it seems like science fiction, it's really anything but.

The Fierce People. That's what anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon called the indigenous Ya̧nomamö Indians of Venezuela in his 1968 book Ya̧nomamö: The Fierce People. It's one of the best-selling anthropology texts of all time and is still in wide use.

The world's first space tourist is financing a project that aims to launch an American man and woman on a mission to fly by Mars in 2018.

Back in 2001, businessman Dennis Tito shelled out about $20 million to ride a Russian spaceship up to the International Space Station. Now he's unveiled a new nonprofit group called the Inspiration Mars Foundation.

As if calling the Higgs particle "the God particle" didn't cause enough confusion and misinformation, here we go again, with the Higgs hitting the spotlight once more, but now as prophet of doom.

Yes, dear readers, it seems that the destiny of the Universe is in the hands of this particle or, more precisely, of the value of its mass.

This is no ordinary family heirloom.

The granddaughter of English scientist Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA who passed away in 2004, is putting his Nobel Prize medal up on the auction block.

This week I'm at CERN (with co-blogger Stuart Kauffman), the high-energy physics laboratory where, last July, the Higgs particle was found. Yesterday, we heard from Sergio Bertolucci, CERN's director of research and scientific computing.

Pay no attention to this housefly. We'll get to it later, but first, how about a "Do You Recognize This?" quiz.

If I say "DNA," what do you see? Well, instantly, you see one of these:

But what if I say "protein"? What comes to mind? Anything?

Well, for many people, "protein" is what you find on a plate ...

Researchers say more young American women are being diagnosed with advanced breast cancer.

It's a newly recognized trend. The numbers are small, but it's been going on for a generation. And the trend has accelerated in recent years.

Melissa Block speaks with Sid Perkins, a freelance writer specializing in earth sciences, about the recent discovery of a "lost microcontinent" submerged beneath the Indian Ocean.