Science

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have returned to Earth after being stuck in space for more than nine months. Their SpaceX capsule parachuted into the Gulf of Mexico early Tuesday evening.

NASA’s stuck astronauts are heading home after nine months on the International Space Station. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams boarded a SpaceX capsule late Monday night, along with NASA Astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.

Video of a private lunar lander carrying a drill, vacuum and other experiments for NASA touching down on the moon Sunday has been released.

Several people in the Bahamas witnessed the explosive wreckage of the failed Starship rocket as it flew across the sky.

The threat of a newly discovered asteroid has risen slightly in the past few weeks, as the world’s telescopes rush to track its course. But the chance of an impact is still quite slim.

Jeff Bezos’ rocket company gave NASA a brief taste of the moon’s gravity Tuesday, without straying too far from home.

New research shows that when an asteroid slammed into the moon billions of years ago, it carved out a pair of grand canyons on the lunar far side. (AP video produced by Javier Arciga)

Asteroid samples fetched by NASA hold not only the pristine building blocks for life but also the salty remains of an ancient water world, scientists reported Wednesday.

A Hungarian astrophotography enthusiast shot the night sky with timelapse videos depicting each month of the year in southern Hungary. Flórián Csatai’s video is the result of 12 months of work.

New discoveries from several archaeological sites in North and South America suggest that ancient people first arrived in the New World much earlier than scientists once thought. (AP Video: Mary Conlon & Christina Larson)

An underground detector in China will sniff out mysterious ghost particles called neutrinos

Do you miss an old pet? Still mourning a deceased dog you had a special bond with? The UK’s first commercial clinic for cloning is giving people the chance to recreate their favorite animal.

Researchers have created a robot which can move like a bird, both on the ground and in the air. They believe a scaled-up version of the machine could be used in disaster zones or to access hard-to-reach locations.

Known across the globe as the stuck astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams hit the six-month mark in space Thursday with two more to go. (AP video by Shelby Lum/AP produced by Javier Arciga)

SpaceX on Tuesday launched another Starship rocket, but passed up catching the booster with giant mechanical arms as Donald Trump joined Elon Musk to watch. (AP produced by Javier Arciga)

It is the world’s rarest whale, with only seven of its kind ever spotted. Almost nothing is known about the enigmatic species. But on Monday a small group of scientists and cultural experts in New Zealand clustered around a near-perfectly preserved spade-toothed whale hoping to decode decades of mystery.

A major storm, with a scary-sounding weather term, is sweeping across the northwest U.S.: Bomb cyclone

Experts said Tuesday the sun is currently at the maximum phase of its 11-year cycle, making solar surges and northern lights more frequent.

A massive NASA spacecraft is ready to set sail for Jupiter and its moon Europa. The craft named Europa Clipper will peer beneath the moon’s icy crust and determine whether conditions there could support life.

A NASA spacecraft rocketed away Monday on a quest to explore Jupiter’s tantalizing moon Europa and reveal whether its vast hidden ocean might hold the keys to life.

People caught a glimpse of the “ring of fire” eclipse of the sun at the southern tip of Patagonia. The annular solar eclipse was visible Wednesday over Easter Island and the tips of Argentina and Chile. (AP video by Victor R. Caivano)

The findings are based on seismic measurements from NASA’s Mars InSight lander, which detected more than 1,300 marsquakes before shutting down two years ago.

A new study suggests that the first animal that glowed in the dark was a coral that lived deep in the ocean about half a billion years ago. That’s far earlier than previously thought.

A new study shows the return of sea otters and their voracious appetites has helped rescue a section of California marshland. Researchers found that the return of the crab-eating sea otters to a tidal estuary near Monterey, California, since the 1980s helped curb erosion. (Jan.31)

Hundreds of endangered sea turtles are struggling to survive, stunned by cold water after getting trapped in Cape Cod Bay’s hook-shaped geography (AP Video: Rodrique Ngowi and Steven Senne)

Cape Cod has a long history of marine mammal strandings partially because of dramatic changes in the tide that sometimes trap wayward dolphins chasing fish too close to shore.

The largest coral in the world has been found in the Solomon Islands. The coral, which is visible from space, is three times larger than the previous record-breaker, and is believed to be about 300 years old.

Planet Earth is parting company with an asteroid that’s been tagging along as a “mini moon” for the past two months. Scientists suspect it may be a boulder that was blasted off the moon during an asteroid impact.

Distant, ancient galaxies are giving scientists more hints that a mysterious force called dark energy may not be what they thought. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument uses a telescope to create a three-dimensional map of the universe over 11 billion years.

We see lots of mummies in Halloween decorations and scary movies, but real mummies are the remains of individual people, and museum scientists who work with them go beyond the scary stereotypes to give mummified individuals the respect they’re due as real people just like us.

As if the largest bug to ever live – a monster nearly 9 feet long with several dozen legs – wasn’t terrifying enough, scientists could only just imagine what the extinct beast’s head looked like.

Scientists have discovered that bottlenose dolphins use a smile-like open-mouth expression to communicate during play. This expression occurs primarily when one dolphin is in the field of view of another and often prompts mimicry, suggesting a sophisticated form of non-verbal communication.

A wave of odd-colored lobsters has showed up in fishers’ traps, supermarket seafood tanks and scientists’ laboratories over the last year, inspiring headlines that trumpet their rarity. (AP Video: Nick Perry)

Scientists are monitoring wild rattlesnakes through a webcam in remote northern Colorado, observing rattlesnake activity around the clock. The livestream is part of a community science initiative called Project RattleCam.