Wired Science

A giant impact early in the history of Iapetus deformed the Saturnian moon, flattening its poles and producing a spiky, equatorial mountain range.

NASA’s Opportunity rover has begun examining ancient clays on Mars that would have formed in the presence of water with neutral acidity and stumbled across an intriguing new geologic puzzle.

Scientists have grown bacteria in a very low atmospheric pressure environment, similar to the surface of Mars.

A team of researchers might have figured out how to use remote sensing to identify hidden ancient archaeological sites in the dense Amazonian forest.

An extraterrestrial impact crater is hiding near a Canadian ghost town. Nearly 5 miles across and 3,000 feet deep, the stealth crater has lurked just west of Bow City, Alberta for millions of years, scientists reported Dec. 3 at the …

Despite long experience with the ways of the world, older people are especially vulnerable to fraud. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), up to 80% of scam victims are over 65. One explanation may lie in a brain region …

Tethys may not be tiny by normal standards, but when it is captured alongside Saturn, it can’t help but seem pretty small.

In it’s first analysis of Martian soil, NASA’s Curiosity rover detected perchlorate salts and simple organic compounds but the probe’s science team can not yet determine if the carbon in these materials is indigenous to Mars.

Internet rumors have been swirling for several weeks of a secret venture backed by private entrepreneurs that would return people to the moon’s surface. It seems that the veil will finally be lifted this week, during a press conference in …

We’re not sure what we love most in these vintage public service announcements: the retro filming, the awkward dialogue, the sometimes bizarre celebrity combos (Gloria Steinem and Chuck Heston?), or the valuable information about NASA’s spin-off technologies.

In its first glimpse of the heavens following the successful December 1999 servicing mission, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured a majestic view of a planetary nebula, the glowing remains of a dying, Sun-like star. This stellar relic, first spied …

This image from the APEX telescope, of part of the Taurus Molecular Cloud, shows a sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than ten light-years long. In it, newborn stars are hidden, and dense clouds of gas are on the verge …

Financial giant Barclays is considering an end to food speculation, a controversial practice linked to sudden, dangerous spikes in global food prices. Rich Ricci, head of Barclays’ corporate and investment banking arm, told British lawmakers on Nov. 28 that public …

What’s most intriguing to me, though, is how medieval ribbon farms – or rather the lack thereof in much of the United States – shaped attitudes toward modern transportation, and continue to shape our psychology as a nation today.

Musical compositions based on the structure of silk could help engineers make stronger threads.

This new topographic map, from Arizona State University in Tempe, shows the surface shape and features over nearly the entire Moon with a pixel scale close to 100 m (328 feet). A single measure of elevation (one pixel) is about …

During intense emotional experiences, there’s a fleeting moment when expressions of pleasure and pain are hard to distinguish. In fact, others read intense emotion more effectively by looking at a person’s body language than by watching his facial expressions, a …

Tiny lights swarm like fireflies, representing trains, busses, and ferries shuffling people across different metropolises over the course of a day. These videos show off 24 hours of public transportation in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Washington D.C., Auckland, and …

Capturing a multicolored, all-sky image of the auroras that decorate Earth’s polar skies is now possible. Normally, studying these shimmering phenomena means taking multiple images of an aurora, using different filters that block or image different wavelengths. Now, a camera …

For the first time, scientists have confirmed that the planet Mercury holds water ice and organic material in permanently shadowed craters at its North Pole.