It has long been rumored that colonoscopy screening tests are 90 percent effective at locating cancer in your colon. Yet a new study published online in the Annals of Internal Medicine indicates that the screening method is not as effective as doctors thought, often missing cancers located on a person's right side. New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata explains the study and how it might affect your next doctor's visit. To find out more, read Gina Kolata's article, "Colonoscopies Miss Many Cancers, Study Finds," at the New York Times.

But will the economic slowdown hamper environmental progress?

Now that it's possible to program unmanned combat vehicles to make decisions about where (and who) to strike in war situations, new questions of ethics have risen: In which situations can we allow robots to make their own decisions? Can we program robots to follow the Geneva Conventions? There is a more basic question, too: Do we even want robot soldiers?

» Video: "America's Disappearing Forests" (The New York Times)
» "Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West" (The New York Times)

"If you stand on a mountaintop in Colorado you can look in every direction and see dead trees. It is everywhere."
--Jim Robbins on the impact of pine beetle infestations

"Just looking at a picture of nature was relaxing enough to actually produce some cognitive benefits." -- Jonah Lehrer

Dead bats in caves all over New England share one common trait: unusually white, fuzzy noses. A new study points to a fungus as the culprit.

The largest children's study ever undertaken in the United States kicks off in 2009. Researchers plan on tracking 100,000 kids from the womb to the age when they can legally crack open a beer. Scientists hope 21 years worth of hair, urine and environmental samples will reveal why the incidence of childhood disease is on the rise.

How many times have you heard the phrase, “Life’s not fair?” And yet, we haven’t let it stop us from trying to make everyone equal. We right wrongs, punish evil-doers, stop injustice. But what explains our urge to retaliate or our need to stick it to Wall Street for the subprime mess? It turns out it’s all in our genes, baby. New York Times science reporter Benedict Carey talks about the evolution behind retaliation, and our primal urge to make the world a little fairer.

Down in the Galapagos, a long extinct sea turtle may be resurrected from the dead. An international team of researchers has found that a living breed of tortoise carries some of the same genes as an extinct type of turtle. Now, scientists are hatching a plan to bring the extinct Darwinian tortoise back to life.

India has become the first country to convict a person of a crime based on a brain scan. This past summer, a woman was given a life sentence for murder after prosecutors strapped her to memory-scanning electrodes and ran a test called Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature, or BEOS. Could this be coming to America anytime soon?