The recent suicide of Army scientist Bruce E. Ivins, shortly after being implicated, brought a likely end to the Anthrax scare of 2001 but, while information on this specific case remains sealed, the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland is unclassified and available online to researchers. It contains more than 85,000 terror incidents since 1970. Hundreds of details associated with each incident are included to make the tool most useful to social scientists.

It shows that the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States may be the only ones on record.

Bio-chemical terrorist attacks are very rare, according to Gary LaFree, director of the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security-funded National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).

Male circumcision has been performed as far back as ancient Egypt, and the practice has continued through the ensuing centuries for religious, cultural and sociopolitical reasons.

Performing circumcision for potential health benefits gained momentum in the 19th century with the advent of anesthesia and the initial epidemiological studies demonstrating lower rates of venereal diseases in circumcised men. Recent studies have shown that circumcised men are at significantly lower risk of urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis and chancroid.

Additional studies point to lower risk of invasive penile carcinoma, gonorrhea and chlamydia (in female partners).

Mayo Clinic endocrinologist James Levine, M.D., Ph.D., has laid out some environment-changing innovations with a six-month study of a real-life office that was re-engineered to increase daily physical activity, a program called NEAT (non-exercise activity thermogenesis).

The study began in late 2007 and ended in 2008 at SALO, LLC, a Minneapolis-based financial staffing firm. Of the 45 employee volunteers involved in the scientific study, 18 were studied for weight loss and other changes.

Over the last decade, childhood obesity has grown into an epidemic, reflected in soaring rates of type 2 diabetes and recommendations that pediatricians check toddlers for elevated cholesterol.

What hasn't been as clear is how early to intervene.

A study presented at a pediatric research program on Friday suggested obesity prevention efforts should begin as early as age two, when children reach a "tipping point" in a progression that leads to obesity later in life.

The pinhole camera, a technique known since ancient times, has inspired a futuristic technology for lensless, three-dimensional imaging. Working at both the Advanced Light Source (ALS) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and at FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, an international group of scientists has produced two of the brightest, sharpest x-ray holograms of microscopic objects ever made, thousands of times more efficiently than previous x-ray-holographic methods.

The x-ray hologram made at ALS beamline 9.0.1 was of Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing "Vitruvian Man," a lithographic reproduction less than two micrometers (millionths of a meter, or microns) square, etched with an electron-beam nanowriter. The hologram required a five-second exposure and had a resolution of 50 nanometers (billionths of a meter).

On August 1, a total solar eclipse was visible in parts of Canada, northern Greenland, the Arctic, central Russia, Mongolia and China. The eclipse swept across Earth in a narrow path that began in Canada’s northern territory of Nunavut and ended in northern China’s Silk Road region.

Though the eclipse was not visible in most of North America, NASA TV and the Exploratorium made streaming video of the event available online. The following images are taken from that video, shot from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in northwestern China near the Mongolian border. The sun appears differently in some of the images because of the different filters used to capture the event. Times listed are ET and approximate.