Many of us once dreamed of becoming astronauts. But faced with the prospect of attaining an advanced aeronautics degree, enduring g -force training, and, um, drinking recycled urine, most of us opted for more mundane careers...
The Hubble Space Telescope has had a long and illustrious run, helping to pin down the age of the universe and pointing the way to the existence of dark energy.
NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, launched in 2004, completed its second flyby of Mercury early Monday morning, passing within 125 miles (200 kilometers) of the planet’s surface and snapping striking photographs of never-before-seen terrain...
Work on so-called symmetry breaking helped to shape the Standard Model and explain why matter won out over antimatter
NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, having already uncovered water ice in the soil of the Red Planet's northern polar plains, has now spotted another sight familiar to those of us who dwell in the higher latitude climes back on Earth: falling snow...
Yesterday we reported on the impending announcement of two newly discovered mammoth prime numbers, and the details, now out, do not disappoint. According to the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), the volunteer-powered distributed-computing group responsible for finding most of the largest known primes (a prime number is divisible only by 1 and itself), both are larger than any other known primes: one clocks in at nearly 13 million digits in length and the other at a slightly smaller 11.2 million digits...
Prime numbers have long held a special appeal among the mathematically minded, from the Greek astronomer Eratosthenes, who devised a method for finding primes some 2,200 years ago, to the cryptographers who made them the foundation of today’s encryption protocols...
Aquaponics fertilizes plant crops with bacteria-treated fish waste products. The plants return the favor by filtering the fish's water—and humans can eat both of them
Compact fluorescent lightbulbs contain a minuscule amount of mercury, and you can't safely ignore potential contact with it
Incandescent lightbulbs are lumbering toward extinction. Now, how best to use their energy-efficient replacements?
A myth as durable as gum itself holds that the chewy confection sticks to your innards like it does to the bottom of a desk
If you were counting on infinity being absolute, your number's up
Forget turning out the lights to give jumping spiders privacy for mating
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