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'I LOVE IT WHEN IT OUST TURNS INTO A STAR!' Christina Koch exclaimed. The NASA astronaut and three colleagues, dressed in blue flight apparel, were standing on a knoll at [...]

DANTE LAURETTA IS SERENE AS HE PREPARES FOR THE 17 SECONDS HE'S WORKED TOWARD FOR THE PAST 16 YEARS. Lauretta, a University of Arizona planetary scientist, is transfixed by a [...]

In the entryway of Frankfurt, Germany's Senckenberg Natural History Museum, a remarkable ambassador from the distant past holds court: a dog-size dinosaur called Psittacosaurus that died some 130 million years [...]

SINCE 2000 THE WORLD'S GLACIERS HAVE SHED MORE THAN 5.3 TRILLION METRIC TONS OF WATER, REMAKING LANDSCAPES AND RAISING SEA LEVELS. BOB MCNABB IS one of the keepers of a [...]

01 HOW THEY MOVED 02 HOW THEY HATCHED 03 HOW THEY GREW 04 HOW THEY LOOKED 05 HOW THEY SOCIALIZED On a chilly January afternoon, Susannah Maidment stands on the [...]

ONE OF THE most critical steps in the evolution of vertebrate life--even bigger than our aquatic forebears' first waddles onto land--was the evolution of the jaw. From biting food to [...]

Prehistoric petals This 1.1-inch-wide flower, 34 to 38 million years old and described in 1872, is the biggest amber fossil of its kind ever found. A new study of the [...]

ON 445 ACRES in southern France, construction is under way on a hugely ambitious experiment: a doughnutshaped vacuum chamber surrounded by 11,000 tons of magnets, built to sub-millimeter precision by [...]

IN THE 1984 FILM GHOSTBUSTERS, a ragtag crew of parapsychologists does battle with Zuul, a hellhound with a gargoyle's face. Minions possessed by the fictional beast proclaim, 'There is only [...]

The article discusses NASA's preparations for the Artemis moon program, focusing on the testing of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket through aerodynamic tests in a wind tunnel, high-fidelity tests of astronauts wearing lunar suits. It also mentions the assembly of the SLS and the Orion spacecraft in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center.

On the afternoon of March 21, 2011, a heavy-equipment operator named Shawn Funk was carving his way through the earth, unaware that he would soon meet a dragon. That Monday [...]

On Earth, we know flames as flickering tongues--but in space, that changes. Without gravity, hot air lacks the buoyancy to whip flames into their familiar, dancing forms. In microgravity they [...]

How did humans go from an innate, general sense of quantity-a pair, a few, many--to inventing numbers and arithmetic? Why are counting systems so diverse across global cultures? Answering these [...]

Humans have long derived morphine and codeine from opium poppies. But how did the flowers evolve to have pain-killing powers? Messily. The poppy's DNA shows that over more than 110 [...]

It's been 66 million years since the dinosaurs went extinct. So scientists should know everything there is to know about these creatures, right? Well, not exactly. (It's not like there [...]

SINCE IT EMERGED from a Bavarian limestone quarry in 1861, the first known fossilized feather has been a paleontology icon: shockingly similar to modern bird feathers yet unfathomably ancient. The [...]

From the snowcapped Andes down to the rugged coastlines, Chile has some of South America's most spectacular landscapes--and they've recently gained vast protections. For more than 20 years, Kristine Tompkins, [...]

From scales to feathers to fur, vertebrates clothe themselves in a dazzling variety of textures and hues. But scientists have shown that many of those coverings emerge from the same [...]

NINE MILES NORTH of the volcano called Ol Doinyo Lengai, which means 'mountain of God,' researchers funded by the National Geographic Society have cataloged a rare find: more than 400 [...]