
Discovery closing in for docking with space station
The space shuttle Discovery is moving closer to the International Space Station (ISS) as it prepares for a planned docking to the ISS at 5:12:46 P.M
John Matson is a former reporter and editor for Scientific American who has written extensively about astronomy and physics. Follow John Matson on Twitter @jmtsn
The space shuttle Discovery is moving closer to the International Space Station (ISS) as it prepares for a planned docking to the ISS at 5:12:46 P.M
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) may have to maneuver the station to evade flying junk as the space shuttle Discovery closes in for docking.
Hot on the heels of square root day, a loosely conceived mathematical celebration that fell on March 3 (3/3/09), comes today's pi day. The present "holiday" celebrates the yearly agreement between the calendar (3/14) and the first three digits of pi (3.14...), the ratio of circumference to diameter for a circle...
The hunt for the long-sought-after particle continues in the U.S. as the Large Hadron Collider in Europe lies dormant
In a lecture at Columbia University this week, famed fractal pioneer Benoit Mandelbrot once again inveighed against traditional economic theories, returning at a time of financial malaise to many of the points he raised in a 1999 Scientific American feature...
Astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) took refuge in a Soyuz escape capsule as a threatening piece of debris passed by without incident today, NASA announced.
The much-postponed launch of space shuttle Discovery on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS) finally looks set to go. The shuttle is scheduled to blast off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida tonight at 9:20 (Eastern Daylight Time), delivering the final pieces of the ISS's solar arrays and helping to boost the station's capacity from three to six crew members...
In 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) agreed on a controversial definition of the word "planet," which included the criterion that a planet must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit...
Late tomorrow night, NASA's Kepler spacecraft will—conditions permitting—lift off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on its unprecedented mission to find habitable, Earth-like planets around distant stars...
A new approach to catching drug cheats and blood dopers is about to get its first test as the UCI tries to recycle its sullied reputation
Black holes, as frighteningly extreme as they may be, are relatively commonplace across the universe. Like most large galaxies, our own Milky Way packs a supermassive black hole at its core, a lurking monster some four million times as massive as the sun...
Saturn's G ring, a faint band of material near the outer bounds of the planet's famed ring system, hosts a bright arc about 90,000 miles (150,000 kilometers) long.
Math lovers and numerologists take note: Today, March 3, 2009, is square root day.
The unofficial holiday comes around but nine times a century, when the numbers of the calendar align so that the month and day are each equal to the square root of the year as expressed in two-digit form...
Osama bin Laden, the FBI's most wanted terrorist, has proved an extremely elusive quarry. Could biology and geography help crack the case—and net the man with a $25-million bounty on his head for plotting numerous terrorist strikes?...
Localized burps add intrigue to the question of Martian life
Pres. Obama's budget proposal for fiscal year 2010 throws White House support behind two of the more controversial NASA plans of the Bush era: retiring the space shuttle in 2010 and returning humans to the moon by 2020...
A Q&A with stellar and planetary scientist Alan Boss about the holy grail of extrasolar planet research--finding Earth-like planets
A University of Florida (UF) professor and his family are under investigation for allegedly falsifying information and funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars from contracts for NASA and other federal agencies into their personal accounts...
The solar system's giant outer planets appear to have sculpted the asteroid belt as they settled into their current orbits
Ice cores drilled from the poles have provided valuable historical climate records, as the composition of the ice and the air bubbles trapped therein offers a relatively pristine glimpse of ancient conditions...
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