Meteorites don't always announce their arrival, but the one bearing down on Canada on Jan. 18, 2000, was not shy. Plunging toward the ground in a roaring fireball, it took aim at Lake Tagish in the British Columbia mountains and — this being winter — smashed itself into fragments on the lake's icy surface. It wasn't until Jan. 25 and 26 that scientists could travel to the site and collect bits of what was once a meteorite measuring ...

When no one owns a resource, we tend to overuse it--winding up with polluted skies, fished-out oceans and battles over access to freshwater. But too much ownership leads to problems too. A pharmaceutical company is stymied by a web of patents and doesn't make a drug. An airport can't buy land for a new runway to ease congestion because dozens of people own slivers of property. A production house, faced with a mishmash of music-licensing rights, keeps an old sitcom ...

In 11th grade, Allante Rhodes spent 50 minutes a day in a Microsoft Word class at Anacostia Senior High School in Washington. He was determined to go to college, and he figured that knowing Word was a prerequisite. But on a good day, only six of the school's 14 computers worked. He never knew which ones until he sat down and searched for a flicker of life on the screen. "It was like Russian roulette," says Rhodes, a tall young ...

In my work as a cardiovascular surgeon, I use the most sophisticated tools of modern medicine to separate patients from their diseased hearts and replace these organs with healthy ones. While my training was in the science of the Western world, I also rely heavily on an ancient Eastern technique--meditation--to help my patients prepare for surgery and to steer them gently toward recovery. Why? Because it works. Every patient who comes to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York ...

From Egypt's Tahrir Square to Tunisia's central Bourguiba Avenue to the plazas of Syria's ancient cities, public squares have been at the center of the Arab Spring. But the centrality of these spaces to the narrative of the uprisings in the Middle East has largely been overshadowed by the role that social networking played in fomenting rebellion. For all the praise that has rightly been lavished upon the Arab world's youthful revolutionaries, one must not forget the ...

Not all of Dr. Richard Mayeux's elderly patients have Alzheimer's disease; not all will even go on to develop it. Most of them are still leading full, healthy lives, interacting with their families and contributing to their communities. But Mayeux, an Alzheimer's researcher and physician at Columbia University, asks them all anyway: Will they help him in his war against the disease? It's been a long and disappointing campaign so far. Alzheimer's disease — the degenerative brain ...

The nervous system is somehow involved in so many diseases and disorders, from fleeting, no-account headaches to crippling paralyses, that doctors are often at a loss to know what part of the patient to treat first. Some forms of liver disease, for example, cause emotional disturbances that can be mistaken for mental illness or signs of brain damage. Merely to diagnose many cases in which the nervous system is involved takes an almost infinite variety of sensitive electronic devices. Treatment ...

We all know that exercise is good for you. Staying physically active helps keep your heart healthy and your muscles strong, and in cancer patients it has even been shown to ward off relapse. Now a series of independently conducted studies on the effects of exercise in healthy older adults, published on Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirms that logging time at the gym not only helps maintain good health but may even prevent the ...

Dr. Harold Ordway Rugg is a mild-mannered, talkative little man, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College who writes history and social-science textbooks. Lively and readable, they are the most popular books of their kind, have sold some 2,000,000 copies, are used in 4,000 U. S. schools. But recently the heat has been turned on.Five years ago a patriot in Washington, D. C. denounced two Rugg books as "communistic," but the District of Columbia Board of Education gave them a clean bill of health. No ...

On the top floor of an ugly office building in Mountain View, Calif., a dozen entrepreneurial dreams are taking flight. Raissa Nebie, a 31-year-old former investment banker from Ivory Coast, is putting the finishing touches on Spoondate, her top-secret dating site for food lovers. Andrew Maguire, a recent Columbia University grad , is racking up listings for InternMatch, a Web service that pairs college students with paid internships. The airy space, with few walls, a panoramic view of Silicon Valley ...