What's it like to stare into the roiling mouth of an active volcano? Pretty darn cool, say scientists who work at Antarctica's Mount Erebus, home of one of Earth's only long-lived lava lakes.   But it's what's happening underneath that glowing, molten rock that is of even greater interest, and new research is offering intriguing answers to what lies beneath the lake.   For the first time, scientists have gotten a glimpse of the rocky plumbing inside the volcano.

Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images Penguins under threat

The Potomac River is much healthier today than it was 40 years ago, when its chemical-laced, sewage-laden waters helped inspire the 1972 Clean Water Act. But the iconic Washington, D.C., waterway still has a long way to go, as suggested by its No.

Bright black-and-red butterflies that live on the fringes of the Amazonian rain forest have developed extraordinary techniques of gene-swapping to survive, scientists reported on Wednesday.   Different species of the Heliconius butterfly are sneakily cross-breeding in order to get superior wing colors, according to a comparison of their DNA codes.   Genetic sharing among species, also called hybridization, is extremely rare in the wild.   It usually ends in an e

Stars like our sun can release "superflares," explosions of up to 10,000 times more energy than the solar flares seen from our sun, researchers say.   However, it looks unlikely that our sun currently has superflares, scientists added.   Astronomers have previously detected superflares from a variety of sta