Science News

NASA was testing recovery and support methods for the Orion space capsule off the coast of California on Friday but halted the test after having trouble securing the capsule. The U.S. space agency said the problem involv...

China has been vilified in recent years for stealing US manufacturing jobs, as have the multinationals increasing assembling products there. One reason for the outsourcing, if not its vilification, is a rational one--Chi...

Increasingly, improving the lots of people around the world requires ever-more carbon emissions, new research finds. Unless something changes, it's unlikely that development and sustainability can go hand-in-hand.

By zapping single atoms of lead in a tiny zircon crystal from Australia, researchers have confirmed the crystal is the oldest rock fragment ever found on Earth -- 4.4 billion years old.

The range of lifestyles seen on the ocean floor of ancient Earth was changed little by the end-Permian mass extinction, the greatest die-off of life on Earth, a new study shows.

Generating electricity is not the only way to turn sunlight into energy we can use on demand. The sun can also drive reactions to create chemical fuels, such as hydrogen, that can in turn power cars, trucks and trains.

Conspiracy theories, decoding manuscripts and octopus wrestling are just a few of the cool science stories we have this week.

(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) A multi-institutional team reports that it can increase sugarcane's geographic range, boost its photosynthetic rate by 30 percent and turn it into an oil-producing crop for bi...

(University of Copenhagen - Niels Bohr Institute) The Andromeda Galaxy is surrounded by a swarm of small satellite galaxies. Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have detected a stream of stars in one...

A 4-year-old endangered right whale that became entangled in nearly 300 feet of fishing line was partially freed Monday after biologists pursued it and removed some of the heavy rope from its mouth. The 30-foot whale was...

Beijing suffered some of its worst smog levels ever starting Friday, when the Chinese government raised the city's four-tiered smog alert to "orange," the second-highest level. The alert prompted schools to cancel outsid...

As many North Americans and Europeans know all too well, this winter has been a particularly chilly one - we can blame a meandering North Atlantic jet stream for that. The 2013-2014 cold season is even setting records. A...

Madagascar's lemur population has been in trouble ever since humans began altering their habitat 2,000 years ago. But conservationists say the fluffy, puppy-eyed primates, which are endemic to the African island nation, ...