Joe Palca

An instrument on NASA's Mars InSight mission that was supposed to be driven into the planet's soil is stuck. It's designed to measure Mars's internal temperature.

Cottonwood trees can harbor microorganisms that have a special (and flammable) characteristic.

Somehow, at the beginning of time, there was an imbalance of matter and antimatter. That's how all the stuff in the universe came about. Scientists think they may find an answer by studying neutrons.

NASA wants you to go to Mars...at least, they want your name to go. As part of a publicity campaign, the public can fill out a form and have a name coded on a microchip to head up in 2020.

Small drones have a problem — their battery life runs out relatively quickly. A team of roboticists says it has created special landing gear that can help conserve precious battery life.

A NASA probe called InSight is on Mars listening for marsquakes and it seems it has detected the first sounds of a quake, probably.

A biologist at Harvard was chatting with a colleague about a mentor who pushed him to do harder math problems. It turns out the colleague had the same mentor — and so did many others.

For more than a decade, Cathy Granholm has been tracking the Laysan albatross. They come down to Hawaii every winter from Alaska to nest and raise their chicks.

A team led by an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Austin has found two new planets by using artificial intelligence to sift through data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Getting DNA into plant cells is tricky. Researchers have tried using infectious bacteria, as well as gene guns that shoot gold bullets. Then a physicist came up with a new approach almost by accident.

NASA's six-wheeled rover landed on the red planet in January 2004 for what was billed as a 90-day mission. The plucky robot was still going until a dust storm on Mars last summer killed it.

A lot of vaccines and some medications need to be delivered by injection. Two groups of researchers are designing ways of delivering these medications by putting them in pill form.

A new study suggests that being a morning person makes you slightly less susceptible to depression or mental illness. It, however, is not a very big effect.

Space scientists on Earth have improvised a tool on the Mars rover to help them figure out how a giant mountain on the Red Planet came to be. Their surprising conclusion: It's likely windswept sand.

As a child on a New York farm, Eben Bayer helped his dad shovel wood chips in the barn. That's where he noticed a stretchy web of fungus that became the basis of his biodegradable packing material.

Government, academic and industry researchers often depend on each others' work and funding. The partial shutdown is getting in the way of some of that collaboration and research.

Fast Radio Bursts are extremely powerful bursts of energy coming from far beyond the Milky Way. No one knows what's causing them but a new telescope in Canada should help find an explanation.

Early in 2019, China hopes to land a rover — the first soft landing on the moon's far side. The mission is exploratory, and will lay groundwork for a trip by Chinese astronauts to the lunar surface.

Two briefcase-sized satellites gave the control room of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in November what scientists had never been able to get before: real-time information about a spacecraft's landing.

The Mersenne prime was discovered by a computer in Ocala, Fla., on Dec. 7. Mathematicians have spent the past two weeks verifying the calculations.