Meghan Bartels

The Democratic senator represents the state of Montana and is up for re-election this fall.

Gates compared the risk of a pandemic disease outbreak to the challenges of preparing for a massive war.

NASA says some of the rover's instruments will still find their way to the Moon.

The lander does use essentially the same shield, but its equipment has been double-checked.

Almost a third of coastlines around the world not covered in ice are sandy beaches.

Right now, scientists only have two options for analyzing Martian material directly, and both have serious downsides.

Satellites have collided only four times in the past 30 years, making it difficult to form generalizations about cause.

The new experiment relied on a cannon that can shoot marbles at speeds of more than 11,000 miles per hour.

Scientists now believe humans stalked and then confronted a giant ground sloth thousands of years ago in New Mexico.

Ganymede is bigger than the planet Mercury, and all three of the others outsize ex-planet Pluto, making their formation a huge mystery.

Wall-E and Eva were nicknamed in honor of characters from the Pixar film, thanks to the scene in which Wall-E uses a fire extinguisher to dance through space, which mimics how these two real spacecraft will move.

Stronger gravity requires stronger—and pricier—rockets to overcome.

It's one thing for a business plan to aim for the stars, but it's another thing entirely for a country to pin their dreams on reaching asteroids.

"You haven't lived until you've put your arms around a mammoth femur trying to measure it," Smith said.

To date, astronomers have confirmed 3,717 exoplanets—all in less than three decades.

Scientists may have been thinking about moons formed by impacts across the solar system in the wrong way.

"There's always something new being discovered, Velez-Juarbe said. "The discoveries are coming faster than we can include them in our own work."

One small step for man, zero small steps for women (so far).

Early dinosaurs were at the mercy of weather patterns unfolding across the supercontinent Pangaea.

This is what NASA's brand new telescope can and can't learn about exoplanets.

There are about 400 subglacial lakes around the world, but these are the first scientists believe to be salty.

Scientists are excited about the prospect the mission holds for new discoveries, but if you're just learning about the mission now, here's what you need to know.

"Mercury is just so weird and so exotic compared to the Moon and other terrestrial planets," Kathleen Vander Kaaden, a planetary scientist at the engineering company Jacobs Engineering Group working on a contract at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas, told Newsweek.

The Japanese Meteorological Agency has warnings out to keep people away from the crater itself, but remotely operated news cameras can ignore them.

The cluster of stars is practically as old as the universe itself.

"I think people didn't really think about [phosphorus]" in comparison to ingredients like carbon and water, Greaves told Newsweek. "It's kind of a nice opportunity to go, 'Look, this matters and it's not super hard.'"

A bad cold can show you the value of a good nose.

This is the second type of atmospheric wave scientists have identified using data from the August eclipse.

"It's just completely bizarre that we should have two planets the same size but opposite ends of the habitability spectrum."

Flying faster than the speed of sound produces shock waves that result in a loud booming sound, but NASA hopes to turn down the volume.