The Cassini spacecraft is in splendid shape as it circles Saturn. Conceived in the 1980s and launched in 1997, Cassini arrived at the gas-giant planet in 2004 and has continued to deliver stunning images of the jewel of the solar system. The unmanned probe scored ...
The air is so clear the mountains in the distance look almost fake, as if added digitally. The desert floor is runway-flat, with a few Joshua trees popping up randomly, like lost cowboys. The dominant feature is the sky, preposterously vast, beckoning test pilots, ...
Dealey Plaza is a depression. It is a shallow basin on the western edge of downtown, framed by concrete structures called pergolas and peristyles that were built in the late 1930s by the Works Progress Administration. Designed as a gateway to the city, the ...
Social polarization wasn't invented yesterday. Ask the scientists studying the bones of prehistoric Europeans. Hundreds of skeletal remains, many from a newly discovered cave in Germany, have produced a startling reminder of the power of social boundaries. When farmers showed up from the Near East ...
Martian life is awfully cryptic — that is a scientific term; it means life that is out of sight, below the surface, burrowed into ecological niches not easily scrutinized by robotic sentinels from the planet Earth.
Long ago, in a dreamier era, space stations were imagined as portals to the heavens. In the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," the huge structure twirled in orbit, aesthetically sublime, a relaxing way station for astronauts heading to the moon. It featured a ...
NASA is looking for a rock. It has to be out there somewhere — a small asteroid circling the sun and passing close to Earth. It can't be too big or too small. Something 6 to 9 meters in diameter would work. It can't ...
Gold — atomic number 79, element symbol Au and the most widely beloved of the precious metals — might have its origin in extremely rare and violent explosions in the far reaches of outer space.
Chris Hadfield, who crawled out of a space capsule on the plains of Kazakhstan early Tuesday, is dealing with gravity for the first time in five months and sudden global celebrity after singing a gone-viral made-in-space music video. By late Wednesday, almost 10 million people ...
It was the biggest battle of the war, unequaled in scale and violence by anything seen before or since in North America. Two immense armies collided in the fields and orchards and woods around Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 1863, and fought for three ...
