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The “democratization” of space, including more involvement of amateur astronomers, is underway thanks to a ballooning and publicly accessible global astronomical database.

Fearing budget cuts, N.A.S.A. chief Charlie Bolden told Congress that the next-generation space telescope has greater potential for discovery than the iconic Hubble Space Telescope.

Major scientific endeavors like space exploration require decades of planning and funding sources that can weather economic downturns. Will the results of the Google Lunar X Prize competition stand that assumption on its head?

Last night on Twitter, some of us geology-types (including Brian Romans, Yorrike, Volcanojw, Ron Schott, Cian Dawson) had a discussion about “big picture” geology projects. We’re talking about the equivalent […]

As N.A.S.A.’s space shuttle program prepares for its last launch ever, some say the political compromise that initiated the shuttle program also compromised decades of research.

A European space telescope has found 10 previously unknown alien planets, all of which are gaseous like Saturn or Jupiter. They boost the count of extrasolar planets to 565.

The Allen Telescope Array, a set of 42 radio telescopes that has been searching for alien signals and conducting astronomical research since 2007, has been shut down due to budget cuts. 

N.A.S.A.’s Kepler Space Telescope detected 1,235 alien planet candidates in its first four months of operation. Alien solar systems with multiple planets appear to be common in our galaxy.

Last Friday, donors for the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute received a letter from CEO, Tom Pierson stating that the Allen Telescope Array was being placed into a state […]

A group of astrophysicists believe they have discovered the first potentially habitable exoplanet, named Gliese 581d. And there could be billions more just like it. 

GUEST POST BY JASON SILVA The spectacular think tank and apparel company The Imaginary Foundation states that “To Understand Is To Perceive Patterns”.  This seemingly simple sentence is actually utterly profound:  what it […]

The asteroid discovery record of 19 objects in one night was set on January 29. The asteroid discovery record was accomplished using a powerful telescope on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

A theory that disputed the existence of dark matter—that mysterious energy causing the universe to expand at an increasing rate—has been disproved by evidence from the Hubble telescope.

The fabled planetary alignment predicted to occur in 2012 is actually happening right now. Is this a sign of the Apocalypse, or just eye candy for stargazers?

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of what astronomers believe may be the oldest galaxy ever seen—over 13 billion years old!

A NASA telescope counting planets in one neighborhood of the Milky Way registered more than 1,200 candidates, including 54 in life-friendly orbits around their parent stars.

n Ahead of the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show in January, Threadless recently announced the winner of the Threadless Loves Innovation t-shirt design contest. Deborah Kassoff, a member of the judging […]

The News Service Office here at Iowa State University has issued me a challenge: use my online network to come up with some ideas for parents to cure kids’ mid-summer […]

The standard cosmological model holds that most of the matter in the universe remains missing in action; now a small but vocal group of cosmologists is challenging that model.

One of the frustrations that comes with a new and interesting idea is the large number of people who will tell you that you’re actually saying something old and familiar. […]

Can and should we try to drill deep into the earth, past the crust and into the mantle? We’ve tried in the past but haven’t gotten far. If the earth was an orange, we’d have barely zested it.

Could life on earth have come from outer-space? NASA finds that the universe is filled with giant carbon buckyballs that might have fallen to earth a long time ago.

Humans have typically been passive listeners for alien radio frequencies. Should we actively seek out foreign life by sending pre-emptive signals into space?

When I first launched my blog in March, you may remember me writing about a blog post entitled “IMAX Hubble 3D & The James Webb Space Telescope.” The new telescope […]

Daryl J. Bem’s experiments on psi caught the world’s attention, as I posted last month, because he used standard psychology-lab methods to gather and analyze his data. Imagine what astronomers […]

On the 9th of December, Astronomers Madhusudhan, Harrington and colleagues recently discovered a massive gas giant planet, orbiting a star which they have coined the first carbon-rich world ever observed. […]

Malcolm Hartley is an Australian astronomer who is best known for his discovery of 5 comets during the 1980s. He has been invited to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California […]

“Two planets similar to Earth have been discovered circling the dwarf star Gliese 581. Using new, super telescopes, astronomers are now searching for signs of life.”

[I’m reviving my Blogs That Deserve a Bigger Audience (DABA) feature. If there is a blog that you think should be featured here, drop me a note.] Today the Crimson […]

At the New Yorker last week, science journalist Jonah Lehrer penned a conversation-starting feature on the so-called “decline effect,” the tendency across scientific fields for a new and exciting finding […]