(Reuters) – Climate change is threatening U.S. landmarks from the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor to the César Chávez National Monument in Keene, California with floods, rising sea levels and fires, scientists said on Tuesday. National Landmarks at Risk, ... More »
COLORADO SPRINGS Colo. (Reuters) – A joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co on Monday said its rocket launch costs were far lower than claimed by its rival, privately-held Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, which is suing the U.S. governme... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) – A Dragon cargo ship owned by California-based Space Exploration Technologies ended a 28-day stay at the International Space Station on Sunday, parachuting into the Pacific Ocean. Space Station commander Steven Swanson used a rob... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – People in heavily populated Pacific and Indian Ocean coastal regions beyond the tropics should take heed, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday, because tropical cyclones increasingly are packing their biggest punch farther from the equator.... More »
(Reuters) – The U.S. government’s medical research agency is taking steps to erase sex bias in pivotal biomedical studies that pave the way for human clinical trials, saying scientists too often favor male over female laboratory animals and cells. A new requir... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government on Thursday took steps to allow limited exceptions to its broad prohibition on the commercial trade in elephant ivory, exempting certain older musical instruments with ivory components as well as ivory in museum and a... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It’s not exactly small at 30 feet long (9 meters), but you might want to call this newly identified dinosaur the littlest giant. Scientists in Argentina on Wednesday announced the discovery of the fossilized remains of a unique member of... More »
ALMATY (Reuters) – A Russian rocket carrying a $275 million telecommunications satellite failed and burned up shortly after launch on Friday, the latest in a series of setbacks for Russia’s once-pioneering space industry. It was the second failure for Russia’s... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A horrible day for a teenage girl perhaps 13,000 years ago – death in a Mexican cave – has turned into a wonderful day for scientists who have managed to coax important secrets out of the oldest genetically intact human skeleton in the N... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) – Jupiter’s most distinctive feature – a giant red spot bigger than Earth – is shrinking, images from the Hubble Space Telescope released on Thursday showed. The so-called “Great Red Spot” is a violent storm, which in the late 180... More »
(Reuters) – Honey bees, crucial in the pollination of many U.S. crops, are still dying off at an worrisome rate, even though fewer were lost over the past winter, according to a government report issued on Thursday. Total losses of managed honey bee colonies w... More »
CHENNAI India (Reuters) – Six workers were injured when hot water spilled from a valve at Kudankulam nuclear power plant in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu on Wednesday, a plant official said, adding there was no leak of radiation. The injured were carryi... More »
LONDON (Reuters) – More than 70 medical bodies in Britain, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca, have signed a pledge to be more open about their use of animals in scientific experiments. The Concordat on Openness on Animal Research was published ... More »
PORT-AU-PRINCE (Reuters) – A 12-year-old orphan boy handicapped from birth became the first recipient of a 3-D printer prosthesis in Haiti last month, thanks to a British-born software engineer in California. Born without fingers on either hand, Stevenson Jose... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A collection of 85 million-year-old fossils including a fish as big as a great white shark with a face like a bulldog has been donated to a new Kansas museum after an outcry from scientists helped scrap a San Diego museum’s plans to sell... More »
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Nighttime dreams in which you show up at work naked, encounter an ax-wielding psychopath or experience other tribulations may become a thing of the past thanks to a discovery reported on Sunday. Applying electrical current to the brain, ac... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a robotic arm for amputees that is named for the “Star Wars” character Luke Skywalker and can perform multiple, simultaneous movements, a huge advance over the metal hook currently in us... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Its nickname may sound funny – “Pinocchio rex” – but it probably would not have been wise to laugh at this strange, long-snouted cousin of the famous meat-eating dinosaur T. rex as it easily could have eaten you alive. Scientists on Wedn... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – This guy could really throw his weight around. Scientists on Tuesday unveiled body weight estimates for an astounding 426 different dinosaur species using a formula based on the thickness of their leg bones, crowning the truly immense lo... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may cut the nutritional quality of some of the world’s most important food crops, researchers reported on Wednesday after conducting experiments simulating conditions expected by mid-cent... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – How do they do it? How do polar bears have such an incredibly high fat diet and get so fat – munching as they do on blubbery seals – without clogging their arteries and becoming a big furry heart attack waiting to happen? The answer: “be... More »
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Scientists have taken the first steps toward writing the blueprint of life in an alphabet unknown to nature, they reported online in the journal Nature. Until now, biologists who synthesize DNA in the lab have used the same molecules – cal... More »
LONDON (Reuters) – The British space scientist Colin Pillinger, best known for his failed attempt in 2003 to put a spacecraft called Beagle 2 on Mars, has died at the age of 70, fellow scientists said. Pillinger, who championed the Beagle 2 project despite som... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Which nest is best to eliminate a blood-sucking pest? Scientists seeking to help endangered Galapagos Islands birds survive a deadly parasitic threat put that question to the test. Researchers on Monday described a new method to assist D... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As club sandwiches go, this undoubtedly is the biggest one in the solar system. Scientists said on Friday that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede may possess ice and liquid oceans stacked up in several layers much like the popular multilayered sand... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists are struggling to find the cause of a disease that is killing off numerous species of starfish on both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North America, dispatching the five-armed creatures in a particularly gruesome way. Rese... More »
(Reuters) – A U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge issued an injunction late Wednesday prohibiting a joint venture between Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing from proceeding with plans to buy Russian-made rocket engines used to send U.S. Air Force satellites into s... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – No offense, but your ancestors probably were no brighter than a Neanderthal. That’s the message a pair of researchers delivered on Wednesday after analyzing archaeological evidence detailing the capabilities of Neanderthals, our closest ... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Are you the type of person who gets dizzy just watching a merry-go-round go round and round? If so, don’t plan a visit to the planet known as Beta Pictoris b. The thing spins like mad. Scientists said on Wednesday that for the first time... More »
MANCHESTER/CAMBRIDGE England (Reuters) – It’s mega strong, ultra light and super stretchy, and if things work out, a wonder material discovered in Britain could change many aspects of human existence – starting with peoples’ sex lives. Safer and sensually supe... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL Fla. (Reuters) – Two U.S. astronauts wrapped up a speedy spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Wednesday, replacing a failed computer that backs up one used to control critical systems such as the station’s solar panel wings. Flig... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It was the start of something big – really big. Scientists on Thursday said they have found a fossil from 163 million years ago that represents the oldest known example of a lineage of advanced flying reptiles that later would culminate ... More »
ZURICH (Reuters) – A laboratory in Switzerland has created the smallest magazine cover in the world, using a tiny chisel to create an image so minute that 2,000 of them could fit on a grain of salt. Scientists carved the 11×14-micrometre image of two pandas th... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Two U.S. astronauts floated outside the International Space Station on Wednesday to replace a failed computer that serves as a backup to critical control systems, including the outpost’s solar panel wings. Flight engineers R... More »
LONDON (Reuters) – Sun seekers who leave northern Europe for warmer climes are marginally less happy than those left behind, a study found. A sample of more than 300 migrants from Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain who resettled... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – The chance of a city-killing asteroid striking Earth is higher than scientists previously believed, a non-profit group building an asteroid-hunting telescope said on Tuesday. A global network that listens for nuclear weapons... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A cargo ship owned by Space Exploration Technologies arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, with a delivery of supplies and science experiments for the crew and a pair of legs for the experimental humanoid rob... More »
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Scientists have moved a step closer to the goal of creating stem cells perfectly matched to a patient’s DNA in order to treat diseases, they announced on Thursday, creating patient-specific cell lines out of the skin cells of two adult men... More »
NEW YORK (Reuters) – How can creatures as different in body and mind as present-day humans and their extinct Neanderthal cousins be 99.84 percent identical genetically? Four years after scientists discovered that the two species’ genomes differ by a fraction o... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – For the first time, scientists have found an Earth-sized world orbiting in a life-friendly zone around a distant star. The discovery, announced on Thursday, is the closest scientists have come so far to finding a true Earth ... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – This may be the role reversal to end all role reversals. Scientists on Thursday described four insect species that dwell in extremely dry caves in Brazil, feed on bat guano and possess what the researchers called an “evolutionary novelty... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You’ve heard of the Model T Ford, the famed early 20th-century automobile that was the forerunner of the modern car. But how about the Model T shark? Scientists on Wednesday announced the discovery of the impeccably preserved fossilized ... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You can forget about the birds and the bees. If you really want to learn how babies are made, you need to know about Juno and Izumo. Fertilization takes place when an egg cell and a sperm cell recognize one another and fuse to form an em... More »
TAMPA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. intelligence community has thrown its support behind a bid by commercial space imagery provider DigitalGlobe Inc to sell higher resolution images from its satellites, the leading U.S. intelligence official said Tuesday. Di... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Parts of the world saw a rare celestial event on Tuesday when the Earth’s shadow fell across the moon, turning it orange. The lunar eclipse unfolded over three hours beginning at about 2 a.m. EDT, when the moon began moving ... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Privately owned Space Exploration Technologies canceled its planned cargo run to the International Space Station on Monday after a helium leak was found in its rocket’s first stage, NASA said. The launch of the Falcon 9 rock... More »
MIAMI (Reuters) – Inside a small bright lab, nestled behind sprawling Banyan trees in Miami’s Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, scientists and volunteers tend to tens of thousands of just-germinated orchids tucked in glass bottles. Fifty thousand more with lo... More »
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Four young women born with abnormal or missing vaginas were implanted with lab-grown versions made from their own cells, the latest success in creating replacement organs that have so far included tracheas, bladders and urethras. Follow-up ... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A NASA mission to pluck samples from a distant asteroid and return them to Earth passed a major technical review, clearing engineers to begin building the robotic spacecraft, officials said on Thursday. The $800 million miss... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – What does a tiny fruit fly have in common with the world’s most advanced fighter jets like the U.S. Air Force’s F-22 Raptor? More than you might think. Scientists using video cameras to track a fly’s aerial maneuvers found the insect emp... More »
TEL AVIV (Reuters) – SpaceIL, a nonprofit organization aiming to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon, said on Wednesday it has received a $16.4 million grant from the foundation of U.S. casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. With a budget estimated at $36 m... More »
PARIS (Reuters) – France’s Veolia Environnement expects its revenue from treating waste water from the mining and metals industries to double to 1.5 billion euros ($2.1 billion) by 2020, as it seeks a growing share of an expanding market, its CEO said on Tuesd... More »
TOKYO (Reuters) – Fighting back tears, a Japanese researcher under fire for fabricating parts of scientific papers hailed as breakthroughs in stem cell research said on Wednesday she stood by her discovery and hoped it could still help the world. The papers pu... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Navy said on Tuesday it continued to examine options for a system to help Northrop Grumman Corp’s new MQ-4 Triton high-altitude unmanned spy plane detect and avoid other aircraft, and expected to decide on a new approach in less... More »
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – A pioneering European Union survey into the impact of pests and diseases on honey bees found death rates were lower than feared, in part countering concerns about the collapse of colonies of the crop-pollinating insects. The study of 32,00... More »
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Four men who had each been paralyzed from the chest down for more than two years and been told their situation was hopeless regained the ability to voluntarily move their legs and feet – though not to walk – after an electrical device was ... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – You’ve heard of having a heart of stone, but this old guy takes it literally. Scientists said on Monday they have found a fossil of a shrimp-like creature that lived 520 million years ago with an exquisitely preserved heart and blood ves... More »
(Reuters) – Yellowstone National Park assured guests and the public on Thursday that a super-volcano under the park was not expected to erupt anytime soon, despite an alarmist video that claimed bison had been seen fleeing to avoid such a calamity. Yellowstone... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – For such small creatures, hummingbirds certainly have racked up an outsized list of unique claims to fame. They are the smallest birds and the smallest warm-blooded animals on Earth. They have the fastest heart and the fastest metabolism... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A U.S. military weather satellite, refurbished after more than a decade in storage, blasted off aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Thursday, a live webcast of the launch showed.... More »
ROME (Reuters) – The ruins of ancient Pompeii will be monitored by satellites and sensors under an agreement with Italian defense and technology group Finmeccanica to try to stop the UNESCO world heritage site from crumbling. The state-controlled group will he... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A year to the day after U.S. President Barack Obama announced a $100 million “BRAIN Initiative” to accelerate discoveries in how gray matter thinks, feels, remembers, and sometimes succumbs to devastating diseases, scientists on Wednesda... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Earth’s moon started forming up to 65 million years later than some previous estimates, according to a study released on Wednesday that uses a new way to calculate the birthday of the 4.47 billion-year-old planet’s only natu... More »
LONDON (Reuters) – Wales could become the first part of the United Kingdom to ban electronic cigarettes in enclosed public spaces due to fears their use could “re-normalize” smoking conventional cigarettes. Welsh Health Minister Mark Drakeford said the rapid s... More »
TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s top research body on Tuesday accused the lead writer of stem cell papers hailed as a game-changer in the field of medical biology of misconduct involving fabrication, but the scientist called the findings unacceptable. Two papers publ... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sometimes bad things come in small packages. A microbe that spewed humongous amounts of methane into Earth’s atmosphere triggered a global catastrophe 252 million years ago that wiped out upwards of 90 percent of marine species and 70 pe... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A Russian spaceship carrying two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut made a belated arrival at the International Space Station on Thursday, returning the orbital outpost to full staff. Russian cosmonauts Alexander Skvort... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Giant pandas eat plenty of veggies, but apparently they like dessert, too. Scientists studying the endangered black-and-white bears said on Thursday that while pandas almost exclusively eat bamboo, which contains only tiny amounts of sug... More »
LONDON (Reuters) – A large international team of scientists has built the clearest picture yet of how human genes are regulated in the vast array of cell types in the body – work that should help researchers target genes linked to disease. In two major studies... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – If there were a gold medal for cetacean diving, it undoubtedly would go to the Cuvier’s beaked whale. Scientists said on Wednesday they tracked these medium-sized whales off the coast of California using satellite-linked tags as the crea... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut blasted off for six-month stay aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday, a partnership unaffected by the political rancor and economic sanctions triggered by Russia’s anne... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Two Russian cosmonauts and a U.S. astronaut blasted off for six-month stay aboard the International Space Station on Tuesday, a partnership unaffected by the political rancor and economic sanctions triggered by Russia’s anne... More »
OSLO (Reuters) – Heavy rains from the Amazon to Australia have curbed sea level rise so far this century by shifting water from the oceans to land, according to a study that rejects theories that the slowdown is tied to a pause in global warming. Sea level ris... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – What does your nose know? A lot more than you might expect. Scientists studying the breadth of people’s sense of smell said on Thursday the human nose can discern far more than the 10,000 different odors long cited as the outer limit of ... More »
(Reuters) – Fierce solar blasts that could have badly damaged electrical grids and disabled satellites in space narrowly missed Earth in 2012, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday. The bursts would have wreaked havoc on the Earth’s magnetic field, matching the s... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – If you’re a dinosaur with a nickname as funky as “the chicken from hell,” you had better be able to back it up. A dinosaur called Anzu wyliei that scientists identified on Wednesday from fossils found in North Dakota and South Dakota doe... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sometimes it is better not to be noticed. A number of insect species look so much like sticks or leaves that they simply blend in with the foliage, providing camouflage that helps keep them out of the beaks of hungry birds hankering for ... More »
ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) – Scientists in Florida studying the way lobsters sniff around for food on the sea floor say they have found a clue to developing technology that could help soldiers detect landmines and hidden explosives from a safer distance than c... More »
PARIS (Reuters) – French farmers and seed firms said they would mount a new challenge to a ban on growing genetically modified maize at the country’s top administrative court, saying it was unjustified. The move on Tuesday comes just three days after France pu... More »
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Astronomers announced on Monday that they had discovered what many consider the holy grail of their field: ripples in the fabric of space-time that are echoes of the massive expansion of the universe that took place just after the Big Bang... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – Detailed maps of Mercury’s cliffs and ditches show the solar system’s innermost and smallest planet Mercury has lost much more real estate due to cooling over four billion years than scientists thought, according to a report... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. scientists said on Thursday they have devised a potentially easier, cheaper and cleaner way to turn natural gas into usable fuels and chemicals – a discovery which could lead to natural gas products displacing oil products in the fu... More »
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The car industry’s international patent filings jumped 18 percent in 2013, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said on Thursday, in part reflecting a push for new technologies to lower exhaust emissions. “In line with grow... More »
ALMATY (Reuters) – An American astronaut and two Russians who carried a Sochi Olympic torch into open space landed safely and on time on Tuesday in Kazakhstan, defying bad weather and ending their 166-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS). “... More »
BOSTON (Reuters) – The big ears are not just for show. Elephants can tell whether a human poses a threat by listening to his voice and sussing out subtle clues about his age, gender and ethnicity, according to a study released on Monday. Researchers from the U... More »
MOSCOW (Reuters) – An American astronaut and two Russians who carried a Sochi Olympic torch into open space will have to stay in orbit one day longer than planned because of bad weather on the steppes of Kazakhstan, officials said on Monday. Cosmonauts Oleg Ko... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla (Reuters) – Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata assumed command of the International Space Station on Sunday, the first Japanese national to oversee a manned space mission. Wakata, 50, had been a space station flight engineer since he and two ... More »
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – EU scientists have found that the new car coolant at the centre of a dispute that has pitched regulators against Germany and its luxury carmaker Daimler does not pose any serious safety risks, the European Commission said on Friday. The Co... More »
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – It’s only the size of a dishwasher and weighs as much as giant panda, but its inventors are hoping this spacecraft will go where no other Israeli vessel has gone before – to the moon. Working on a shoestring budget, the Israeli scientists... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A supermassive black hole inside a distant quasar spins at about 336 million mph (540 million kph) or roughly half the speed of light, according to research published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. Scientists have measu... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In Europe 150 million years ago, this dude was the biggest, baddest bully in town. Two scientists in Portugal announced on Wednesday that they have identified the largest carnivorous dinosaur ever found in Europe, a 33-foot-long (10-mete... More »
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – You can’t spend bitcoins at Amazon.com or to pay your mortgage but, as the Winklevoss twins showed on Wednesday, you can use the digital currency to book a trip into suborbital space. Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who famously accused... More »
LA JOLLA, California (Reuters) – Craig Venter, the U.S. scientist who raced the U.S. government to map the human genome over a decade ago and created synthetic life in 2010, is now on a quest to treat age-related disease. Venter, 67, has teamed up with stem ce... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – President Barack Obama’s 2015 NASA budget plan includes funding for a robotic mission to an ocean-bearing moon of Jupiter and could help boost commercial ventures to fly astronauts to the International Space Station, NASA of... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A panel investigating an astronaut’s near drowning during a spacewalk outside the International Space Station in July found that his spacesuit leaked during an earlier outing, officials said on Wednesday. NASA misdiagnosed t... More »
OSLO (Reuters) – A slowdown in the pace of global warming so far this century is likely to be only a pause in a longer-term trend of rising temperatures, the science academies of the United States and Britain said on Thursday. Since an exceptionally warm 1998,... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In the field of quantum physics, you could call this a droplet in the bucket. Physicists in Germany and the United States said on Wednesday they have discovered an exotic new type of particle that they call a quantum droplet, or dropleto... More »
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – NASA scientists plan to use images shot from space and within the Earth’s atmosphere to help California monitor one of the worst droughts in its recorded history, officials said on Tuesday. Scientists said they would deploy imaging to... More »
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – To put it mildly, this is one gem of a gem. Scientists using two different age-determining techniques have shown that a tiny zircon crystal found on a sheep ranch in western Australia is the oldest known piece of our planet, dating to 4.... More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) – A U.S. Global Positioning System satellite was launched into orbit on Thursday, buttressing a 31-member navigation network in constant use by the military, civilian agencies and commercial customers worldwide. The satellite,... More »
