Science News Headlines

Virunga National Park is inviting tourists on an overnight trek to a spectacular eruption of Mount Nyamulagira in eastern Congo.

Strangers can "see" a persons trustworthy genes through their behaviors, suggests a new study finding that a single genetic change makes a person seem more compassionate and kind to others.

The brain holds a "visual dictionary" of words we have read, allowing quick recognition without sounding out words each time we see them, a new study finds.

A catastrophic prehistoric landslide left behind a giant lake along what is now a river in California, researchers have discovered. The landslide also apparently left its mark on the river's trout, in the form of a genetic similarity, the researchers added.

Russian engineers are still trying to communicate with a wayward Mars moon probe, and they have until early December to fix the spacecraft and send it on its way, according to news reports.

The annual Leonid meteor shower will peak this week, and every year, skywatchers hope to catch stunning displays of ultrafast meteors streak across the sky. This year is no different, but it comes on a special anniversary — the 45th anniversary of the Great Leonid Meteor Storm of 1966.

You can help the environment by getting old. A demographer has profiled the relationship between age and a person's carbon dioxide emissions, showing that after retirement age, our individual contributions to global warming decline.

Russian engineers are scrambling to save the Phobos-Grunt spacecraft amid ever-bleaker signs the mission may be lost. The probe was launched uneventfully Nov. 8, but soon afterward its thruster failed to fire to send it on a course toward Mars, leaving the spacecraft stranded in Earth orbit.

Scientists are jittery but thrilled about the upcoming launch of NASA's Curiosity rover, the largest Mars rover yet.

American scientist John W. Cahn received Japan's annual Kyoto Prize on Thursday, winning 50 million yen, or about $650,000, for his contributions in materials science that led to the creation of stronger, lighter alloys used in cellphones and many electronic devices.

Russian scientists were racing against the clock Wednesday to find a way to fire the engines of an unmanned probe destined to collect surface samples from a moon of Mars, after a post-launch equipment failure left it stuck in Earth orbit.

A miniature photograph of the moon, beard hairs whose owner has been dead for centuries, a shaving of Egyptian mummy bone, flowerlike patterns constructed from butterfly scales and algae called diatoms, and engravings of biblical text.

The guardians of the world's most important standards of weights and measures have turned to the weird universe of quantum physics to try to resolve a dilemma.

It was not always smooth sailing for the six young men who huddled in uncomfortably close quarters on a 520-day fake mission to Mars, a Russian scientist has revealed.

I want to suck your … bacteria? A "vampire" bacteria species, which survives solely by sucking the life out of other bacteria, has had its genome sequenced, revealing its potential to serve as a living antibiotic.