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Some scientists say discrimination against gay and lesbian government employees during James Webb's tenure as NASA administrator should preclude him from having a telescope named in his honor.

The James Webb Space Telescope will let scientists study small, rocky planets around distant stars in more detail than ever before. After decades of work, it could head into orbit later this year.

Hubble's iconic images captured the public's imagination. Will NASA's next big space telescope, which sees infrared light, produce astronomy scenes that pack a similar punch?

An experiment involving dog treats suggests our canine pals may understand the difference when a human withholds a treat by accident and when they do so on purpose. But don't press your luck.

A NASA mission to a potentially dangerous asteroid has let researchers map out its future trajectory like never before.

Carnivorous plants are rare, but now botanists say they've found one that's long been overlooked. It lives just outside Vancouver, British Columbia, and in other parts of the Pacific Northwest.

A mysterious disease is killing off the West Coast's enormous sunflower sea star, so researchers have launched an ambitious effort to breed this species in captivity.

On mountaintop glaciers of Alaska, Washington and Oregon, billions of tiny black worms are tunneling upward to the barren, icy surface. What lures them, and how do they survive the frozen depths?

It's a smackdown of one space monster by another: Scientists have made unprecedented observations of two black holes gobbling two neutron stars — among the weirdest space collisions ever detected.

Potentially, observers in plenty of star systems could have detected Earth sometime in the last 5,000 years. More stars will soon move into positions that would let them see our planet.

The two space probes will study Venus, a scorching hot world that may have once been like Earth. NASA chose the Venus missions over other candidates, such as trips to the moons of Jupiter and Neptune.

Little is known about the night-time habits of tiny creatures all around us. Take the jumping spider--it mysteriously can spend much of the night suspended in mid-air, hanging by a thread.

When a critter spends 17 years underground, it's not easy to study. So as Brood X cicadas break out, they're followed closely by researchers who must cram a lot of work in about six weeks.

Something went boom in outer space and sent radioactive stardust our way, and it's just been found at the bottom of the ocean.

If you've spent any time around cats, you've seen them curl up in cozy spaces. A new study on feline cognition shows that they also like to sit in snug squares created by a kind of optical illusion.

Biologists say newly efficient and accurate gene sequencing techniques have allowed them to fairly quickly detail full genomes and find overlooked genes in a broad range of 25 important species.

Scientists in Michigan went out in the dead of night to dig up part of an unusual long-term experiment. It's a research study that started in 1879 and is handed from one generation to the next.

From fish in jars to rare seeds and microbes, hundreds of millions of biological specimens are stored around the U.S., and caretakers are trying to make them accessible for future research.

Octopuses have an "active" phase of sleep, the kind that might involve dreaming, but they probably don't have long, complicated dreams like people do.

NASA is counting down to what should be the final major test of the massive rocket it is building to put the first woman and the next man on the moon.