NASA is offering up wreckage from the Challenger and Columbia for public view after hiding it from the world for decades.

A new exhibit at Kennedy Space Center features two pieces of debris, one from each lost shuttle, as well as poignant, personal reminders of the 14 astronauts killed in flight.

More than 2,500 astronomers from around the world are descending on Hawaii for a conference at a time when telescope construction is a sensitive issue in the state.

The International Astronomical Union's general assembly starts Monday. It was planned years in advance but is happening amid protests against the building of telescopes atop two mountains held sacred by Native Hawaiians.

It really is the little lander that could.

The European Space Agency's probe Philae may be struggling to stay in touch, but its first finds on its new home are pretty special.

The recent discovery of an Earth twin has boosted chances there is intelligent life on other planets. But while Pope Francis's telescope scans the starlit skies, the Vatican is sceptical of ever meeting Mr. Spock.

On a leafy hilltop near the papal summer home of Castel Gandolfo sits the Vatican's Observatory, one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world, where planetary scientists mix the study of meteorites and the Big Bang theory with theology.

Florida plant detectives are on the trail of a slippery foe, an invasive African land snail that is wily, potentially infectious, and can grow as big as a tennis shoe.

In the four years since Giant African Snails were discovered in Miami, they have slowly but surely spread to new territory, alarming residents in the southern suburbs and the neighboring county of Broward.

Controversy over a leading U.S. reproductive health group supplying fetal tissue for research has focused attention on a little-discussed aspect of science.

Some of the organization's affiliates in the U.S. provide the tissue, according to the pro-choice group, Planned Parenthood. An anti-abortion group says the Planned Parenthood is illegally making a profit from that, and has released covertly recorded videos about it.

Fat needs its place alongside the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami because it evokes unique sensations, U.S. researchers said in a new study.

The sixth flavor should be known as "oleogustus," a combination of oily and taste in Latin, according to Purdue University scientists who published their study in the journal Chemical Senses.

Threatened by the advance of a desert that already covers two-thirds of Niger, the poor Sahel nation hopes to halt rapid deforestation by promoting natural gas.

Giant billboards, media ads starring local celebrities and door-to-door campaigns extol the virtues of gas and alert people to the ecological dangers of unchecked deforestation.

Russia on Wednesday set a date for the first Proton rocket launch since an engine failure in May saw a Mexican satellite destroyed.

Authorities said a Proton-M rocket would blast off from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan on August 28 carrying a British Inmarsat-5F3 commercial communications satellite. 

The last of the wild horses on Great Abaco island in the Bahamas has died, prompting caretakers to collect tissue for possible cloning and hopefully bring back a viable population.

Milanne Rehor, project director for the Wild Horses of Abaco Preservation Society, said Tuesday that a U.S. veterinarian removed tissue from the dead mare and the material has just been shipped to an animal cloning technology company in Austin, Texas.