Astronomers have discovered a fifth planet orbiting a distant sun, marking the first time that another solar system with that many circling bodies has been found.
In the decades since young gay men in the United States started dying from a mysterious syndrome in the 1980s, scientists have wondered how and when the AIDS virus arrived. Many scenarios have been proposed, including one early but now-discounted theory that the disease was imported by a promiscu...
You eat carefully, do not smoke, exercise regularly and think you are taking good care of yourself. But if you drive to work in a heavily congested area such as Los Angeles or Washington, the traffic may be undermining your efforts. A new study has found that while Los Angeles residents spend about...
The decades-long decline in smoking by Americans has stalled for three years, the first time smoking rates have leveled off for that long since the federal government began collecting statistics more than 40 years ago.
Something is stirring deep below the legendary hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone, the first and most famous national park in America -- and home to a huge volcanic caldron.
A long-simmering debate over whether the results of government-funded research should be made freely available to the public could take a big step toward resolution as members of a House and Senate conference committee meet today to finalize the 2008 Department of Health and Human Services approp...
For years, astronomers speculated that a giant, mysterious force lay at the center of the Milky Way, but it wasn't until four years ago that UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez definitively showed what it was.
Two decades ago, Greg Marshall was diving off the reefs of Belize studying queen conchs when he noticed a reef shark passing by with a remora clinging to its belly. The thought occurred to Marshall, who was then a graduate student in marine environmental science, that if a camera could be attached...
Neanderthals, those beetle-browed cousins of ancestral humans who went mysteriously extinct 30,000 years ago, are often depicted as dark-haired and swarthy. Now a study of ancient DNA indicates that at least some of them had fair skin and red hair.
LOS ANGELES, Oct. 28 -- The fires of Southern California were largely abating on Sunday. Hills on both ends of San Diego County still blazed, as did a wooded canyon in Orange County and the tall, dead trees of the San Bernardino Mountains. But with a weekend of favorable winds and even a smattering...
NEW YORK, Oct. 25 -- James D. Watson, who shared a 1962 Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA, announced his retirement Thursday after controversy erupted over comments he made suggesting that black people are less intelligent than whites.
Bush administration officials acknowledged yesterday that they heavily edited testimony on global warming, delivered to Congress on Tuesday by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after the president's top science adviser and other officials questioned its scientific...
