Stories by Meghan Bartels

The asteroid Didymos witnessed its companion get slammed by NASA’s DART spacecraft, and Didymos itself may have interesting activity

Here’s how to tell whether your eye drops are safe to use and how to recognize a potential infection

A new study suggests that ‘Oumuamua, the mysterious visitor that whizzed through our solar system in 2017, may have been merely a small comet from another star

In Key Largo, Fla., scientists are looking to protect endangered native rodents and slow the invasion of massive Burmese pythons

Florida beaches are already receiving hefty batches of brown seaweed, kicking off a year that could break records

Recent research offers a tantalizing glimpse at a future in which two men can have biological children together, but any human applications remain far in the future

A team of moth and butterfly scientists decided to go from a restaurant bar to the lab bench to understand mescal’s iconic “worm”

Archaeologists have found a handful of human skeletons with characteristics that have been linked to horseback riding and are a millennium older than early depictions of humans riding horses

Scientists may have spotted two pairs of merging dwarf galaxies, each pair with a duo of soon-to-collide black holes

Gonzalez v. Google seeks to hold tech giants accountable for recommendation algorithms in a complicated case that could see the Supreme Court meddle in more than 25 years of Internet policy

A train carrying toxic and combustible materials derailed recently in Ohio. Here’s what we know about the situation—and what we can’t know yet

When humans return to the moon, they’ll likely visit one of these 13 regions near the moon’s south pole

The impact has slightly degraded one of the observatory’s mirror segments, but NASA says the telescope has sustained no significant damage

The launch will now occur no earlier than Christmas Day

The giant planet’s hefty gravitational tug helps explain a spate of recent asteroid strikes

The space agency is working to bring the observatory’s science instruments back online

A congressional hearing about NASA’s budget and activities offered more questions than answers about the International Space Station, orbital debris hazards and returning astronauts to the moon

Years of weather monitoring suggest a high-altitude locale in Qinghai Province could host future telescopes

Using data from the OSIRIS-REx mission, scientists calculated slightly increased (but still low) odds the space rock will collide with our planet in the 2100s

Although mission controllers have yet to identify the source of the problem, confidence is high the iconic observatory will soon return to normal operations

EnVision will follow NASA’s DAVINCI+ and VERITAS

The multibillionaire—along with his brother and at least one other passenger—could reach suborbital heights as soon as July 20

The flyby will be the closest a spacecraft has come to the gas giant’s largest moon in 20 years

The anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic voyage to orbit is a chance to reflect on how far human spaceflight has come—and where it’s going next