Science

Michael Ferrara with his German shepherd, Lhotse, at the top of Colorado's Independence Pass Paolo Marchesi/Outside hide caption

Fear The Prius? A Toyota Prius hybrid model car waits for customers at a Toyota dealer in Hollywood, Calif., on March 10. Concerns about the cars suddenly accelerating dogged the company earlier this year. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

The inner four planets of the Gliese 581 system orbit the host star, a red dwarf 20 light-years from Earth, in this rendering from a National Science Foundation artist. The planet in the foreground has a 37-day orbit and, like Earth, is far enough from the star for liquid water to exist. Lynette Cook/via NASA hide caption

One of the goals of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider is to search for the Higgs boson, a particle that scientists say gives everything in the universe mass. For scale, note the workers toward the bottom of the image. Maximilien Brice/CERN hide caption

Residents of Times Beach, Mo., were forced to leave their town in December 1982 because the chemical dioxin was found in the soil. Thirty years later, the Environmental Protection Agency can't decide how dangerous the chemical is. Bill Pierce/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images hide caption

A Lens On History: Advances in DNA technology have given scientists a new tool with which to study ancient human origins. "I think ancient DNA becomes very powerful" now, says one researcher, "because it gives you a direct look into the past." Here, a photographer shoots a reconstruction of a Neanderthal man at a museum in Germany. Sebastian Willnow/AFP/Getty Images hide caption