Joe Palca

Flooding from storms can sometimes lead to contamination from sewage in the drinking water supply. Scientists are trying to develop a quicker test for one troublesome contaminant: norovirus.

Norovirus sickens tens of millions of people each year. They get the disease from contaminated food or water. Engineers have developed a rapid, inexpensive test to detect the virus in water supplies.

Scientists are getting closer to developing a wearable patch that can measure hydration and other health markers — in sweat. The hope is it could give athletes more data to boost their performance.

A lab at Arizona State University tries to find new ways to combat the global scourge of locusts. One solution may have to do with farming practices.

Engineers at the University of California Berkeley have developed a patch that can measure someone's sweat composition and sweat rate at the site of excretion.

Researchers at Arizona State University are studying locusts in hopes of finding better ways of preventing swarms from destroying crops.

An engineer has invented a new way to test for the presence of cholera bacterium in water. The test could be useful in remote areas, because it's lightweight and self-contained.

The South American country is home to the Andes Mountains and the Atacama Desert, places that have some of the stillest and driest air in the world. That makes them ideal for astronomy.

A powerful telescope is taking shape in the Chilean Andes. When finished, it will repeatedly image huge swaths of the sky, searching for rare events such as merging stars and other events.

There's a telescope high up in the mountains of Chile that's looking for signals from the earliest moments of the universe. Finding these signals would be key to explaining how the universe began.

Landing a man on the moon captures the public's imagination. But in the decades after the Apollo program, robots have also generated public excitement about space exploration.

A lot of important astronomy is being done thanks to telescopes stationed in the mountains of Chile, where researchers are studying developments in space.

The path of a total solar eclipse passed over the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile on Tuesday. You had to be in the southern hemisphere to see the eclipse.

On Tuesday, parts of South American will experience a total solar eclipse. The path of totality passes over one the world's premier observatories located in Chile.

There are human cancer genes in plants. Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are studying what they and other human genes are doing there.

The eclipse will happen on July 2. Its path of totality cuts across much of the south Pacific Ocean as well as Argentina and Chile — including a telescope that is one the world's largest.

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.