Dennis Overbye

Scientists will have to wait awhile longer to find out what kicked off the Big Bang.

A year and a half after an equipment failure threatened to derail its epochal search for worlds beyond our solar system, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has bagged another planet, astronomers announced on Thursday.

Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, and on the stubborn strength of their own dreams, a band of astronomers recently restarted one of the iconic quests of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - SETI, for short - which had been interrupted last year by a lack of fin...

European astronomers said on Monday that they had found what might be the best candidate for a Goldilocks planet yet: a lump of something about 3.6 times as massive as the Earth, circling its star at the right distance for liquid water to exist on its surface - and thus, perhaps, to host life, as we narrowly imagine it.

Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to could eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus -- one of six elements considered essential for life -- opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth  using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream abou...

A pair of Russian-born physicists working at the University of Manchester in England have won the Nobel prize  in physics for investigating the properties of ultra-thin carbon flakes known as graphene, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Tuesday.They are Andre Geim, 51, and Konstantin Novoselov, 36. They will split the prize of $1.4 mil...

It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is or...

Scientists will have to wait awhile longer to find out what kicked off the Big Bang.

A year and a half after an equipment failure threatened to derail its epochal search for worlds beyond our solar system, NASA's Kepler spacecraft has bagged another planet, astronomers announced on Thursday.

Operating on money and equipment scrounged from the public and from Silicon Valley millionaires, and on the stubborn strength of their own dreams, a band of astronomers recently restarted one of the iconic quests of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence - SETI, for short - which had been interrupted last year by a lack of fin...

European astronomers said on Monday that they had found what might be the best candidate for a Goldilocks planet yet: a lump of something about 3.6 times as massive as the Earth, circling its star at the right distance for liquid water to exist on its surface - and thus, perhaps, to host life, as we narrowly imagine it.

Scientists said Thursday that they had trained a bacterium to could eat and grow on a diet of arsenic, in place of phosphorus -- one of six elements considered essential for life -- opening up the possibility that organisms could exist elsewhere in the universe or even here on Earth  using biochemical powers we have not yet dared to dream abou...

A pair of Russian-born physicists working at the University of Manchester in England have won the Nobel prize  in physics for investigating the properties of ultra-thin carbon flakes known as graphene, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Tuesday.They are Andre Geim, 51, and Konstantin Novoselov, 36. They will split the prize of $1.4 mil...

It might be a place that only a lichen or pond scum could love, but astronomers said Wednesday that they had found a very distant planet capable of harboring water on its surface, thus potentially making it a home for plant or animal life.Nobody from Earth will be visiting anytime soon: The planet, which goes by the bumpy name of Gliese 581g, is or...