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Millions of years ago, aquatic sloths roamed shallow waters off the coast of modern-day Chile and Peru. These now-extinct swimmers had highly dense bones that facilitated their transition from land to sea by helping them sink to seafloors to graze on vegetation, according to a new report.

12 Mar 2014 1:52am GMT

The storm smash-up that morphed Hurricane Sandy into a hybrid weather monster left a chemical trail that scientists have decoded with the help of crowdsourced water samples.

11 Mar 2014 9:31pm GMT

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) put itself into a precautionary "safe mode" Friday (March 7), but the venerable spacecraft is now on the mend, agency officials say. MRO switched over to safe mode after unexpectedly swapping from one main computer to another, NASA officials said today (March 11). But things should change soon, as MRO's handlers have begun bringing the spacecraft back up to speed, officials said. "The spacecraft is healthy, in communication and fully powered," MRO project manager Dan Johnston, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a statement.

11 Mar 2014 9:11pm GMT

South America nearly carried off Northwest Africa when the world's last supercontinent fell apart 130 million years ago. Now, a new model helps explain why the Sahara settled east of the Atlantic instead of sailing off with South America - it's all about the angles. Back before the Atlantic Ocean formed, Africa and South America nestled together in a massive supercontinent called Gondwana. Two more rifts formed along the future boundaries of South America and Africa.

11 Mar 2014 9:02pm GMT

The moon sets over the Atlantic Ocean in this beautiful photo taken near the shores of Fonte-de-telha pine forest in Portugal. Astrophotographer Miguel Claro recently sent Space.com great shot he took on Feb. 13 using Canon 60Da camera (ISO 500 f/4; Exp:10 sec. 35mm).

11 Mar 2014 7:19pm GMT

An American astronaut and two Russians who carried a Sochi Olympic torch into open space landed safely and on time on Tuesday in Kazakhstan, defying bad weather and ending their 166-day mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS). "Safe arrival back on Earth," said a NASA TV announcer while all-terrain rescue and recovery vehicles were shown trundling across a snowy steppe to the Soyuz TMA-10M capsule. "The crew are reported to be in good health," NASA said. Inside the capsule were former ISS commander Oleg Kotov and flight engineers Sergei Ryazansky and Michael Hopkins from NASA.

11 Mar 2014 5:39am GMT

By Sharon Begley NEW YORK (Reuters) - - As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hear a religious dispute over the Obamacare contraception mandate, advocates on both sides are trying to set the court straight on the science. While the Supreme Court will not be ruling on the science, and has never defined pregnancy, many groups have filed friend-of-the-court briefs offering their view of how emergency contraceptives work.

11 Mar 2014 5:08am GMT

(This March 6 story has been corrected to fix spelling of test to verifi from Verify in paragraph 33) By Julie Steenhuysen LA JOLLA, California (Reuters) - When President Bill Clinton announced in 2000 that Craig Venter and Dr. Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute had succeeded in mapping the human genome, he solemnly declared that the discovery would "revolutionize" the treatment of virtually all human disease. The expectation was that this single reference map of the 3 billion base pairs of DNA -- the human genetic code -- would quickly unlock the secrets of Alzheimer's, diabetes, cancer and other scourges of human health. As it turns out, Clinton's forecast was not unlike President George Bush's "mission accomplished" speech in the early days of the Iraq war, said Dr. Eric Topol of Scripps Translational Science Institute, which is running a meeting On the Future of Genomic Medicine here March 6-7.

11 Mar 2014 1:20am GMT

Researchers from the University of Sussex and the Amboseli Trust for Elephants played recordings of human voices to wild elephants in Kenya and watched how they reacted. "Our results demonstrate that elephants can reliably discriminate between two different ethnic groups that differ in the level of threat they represent," the authors said in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers said the findings provided the first proof elephants can distinguish between human voices, and suggested that other animals seeking to avoid hunters may also have developed this skill.

10 Mar 2014 11:46pm GMT

"We're using pretty sophisticated mathematics to better understand the role of sea ice in the climate system, and, ultimately, to improve our projections of climate change," Golden said in a talk Wednesday (March 6) at the Museum of Math in New York City. In high school and college, he studied the physics of sea ice, but his main interest was mathematics. "I loved sea ice, but I had no intention of building my career around it," Golden told Live Science. Later, he realized that sea ice could be modeled using the same math as composite materials, whose components contain different physical or chemical properties.

10 Mar 2014 9:23pm GMT

Even the president of the United States is into the new "Cosmos." President Barack Obama introduced the new TV series "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey" last night (March 9) during the FOX premiere of the new show, a reboot of Carl Sagan's original "Cosmos" series. "America has always been a nation of fearless explorers who dream bigger and reach farther than others imagine," Obama said during his introduction. "That's the spirit of discovery that Carl Sagan captured in the original 'Cosmos.' Today, we're doing everything we can to bring that same sense of possibility to a new generation because there are new frontiers to explore and we need Americans eager to explore them.

10 Mar 2014 9:21pm GMT

By Kiyoshi Takenaka and Kate Kelland TOKYO/LONDON (Reuters) - A Japanese scientist called on Monday for his own headline-grabbing study on stem cells to be withdrawn from publication, saying its findings had now been thrown into too much doubt. The research - hailed when it came out in January as a breakthrough that could herald a new era of medical biology - was covered widely in Japan and across the world after it was published in the highly reputable science journal Nature. ...

10 Mar 2014 5:03pm GMT

By Pauline Askin SYDNEY (Reuters) - It may sound like science fiction but an Australian team is working on a project to zap orbital debris with lasers from Earth to reduce the growing amount of space junk that threatens to knock out satellites with a "cascade of collisions". The project is very realistic and likely to be working in the next 10 years, Matthew Colless, director of Australian National University's Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, told Reuters. "It's important that it's possible on that scale because there's so much space junk up there," he said. Australia now has a contract with NASA, the U.S. space agency, to track and map space junk with a telescope equipped with an infra-red laser at Mount Stromlo Observatory.

10 Mar 2014 2:49am GMT

AUSTIN, TEXAS - A new television series called "I F-ing Love Science" will air on the Science Channel with Craig Ferguson as executive producer, the late-night star announced here Saturday night (Mar. 8) at the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Ferguson's videotaped announcement was shown at a Science Channel event attended by Elise Andrew, the British biology student who created the wildly popular Facebook group that inspired the series. Andrew said she had not expected her Facebook group to go viral the way it did. "This partnership with Craig and Science Channel is an exciting new venture that I hope will encourage more people to embrace the amazing, wonderful world of science."

09 Mar 2014 9:56pm GMT

AUSTIN, TEXAS - A new television series called "I F-ing Love Science" will air on the Science Channel and will be hosted by Craig Ferguson, the late-night star announced here Saturday night (Mar. 8) at the South by Southwest Interactive festival. Ferguson's videotaped announcement was shown at a Science Channel event attended by Elise Andrew, the British biology student who created the wildly popular Facebook group that inspired the series. "If you know anything about me, you know I love science," Ferguson said. Andrew said she had not expected her Facebook group to go viral the way it did.

09 Mar 2014 9:56pm GMT

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO (Reuters) - Scientists have detected four new man-made gases that damage the Earth's protective ozone layer, despite bans on almost all production of similar gases under a 1987 treaty, a study showed on Sunday. The experts were trying to pinpoint industrial sources of tiny traces of the new gases, perhaps used in making pesticides or refrigerants, that were found in Greenland's ice and in air samples in Tasmania, Australia. The ozone layer shields the planet from damaging ultra-violet rays, which can cause skin cancer and eye cataracts, and has been recovering after a phase-out of damaging chemicals under the U.N.'s 1987 Montreal Protocol. "The concentrations are not yet a threat to the ozone layer," lead author Johannes Laube of the University of East Anglia in England told Reuters of the three types of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbon) and one HCFC (hydrochlorofluorocarbon).

09 Mar 2014 6:29pm GMT