The biggest explosion ever recorded on the moon was caused by a space rock roughly the size of a beach ball.

It weighed 80 pounds and was just over 1 foot wide, but it was going incredibly fast, traveling through space at speeds of 56,000 mph.

And when it collided with the moon, it exploded with the force of 5 tons of TNT, sending off a flash of light bright enough to see from here on Earth.

It was the largest explosion that scientists monitoring lunar impacts had ever witnessed, and it likely made a 65-foot wide hole in the already pock marked lunar surface.

PHOTOS: Stunning views of the Sun

After nine years on the job, NASA’s Mars rover Opportunity has finally broken a 40-year-old record for the longest distance driven on another world.

The Mars rover Opportunity has been exploring the Red Planet’s surface since landing in January 2004. The last record for any NASA vehicle was set by Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972 when they drove a lunar rover 22.21 miles over the moon’s surface over three days. Opportunity finally inched past that mark Thursday, tacking on 263 more feet for a total distance traveled of 22.22 miles.

Why did it take the Mars rover nine...

When the magnitude 9 earthquake struck Japan more than two years ago, there were 1,200 global positioning system stations recording ocean floor movement in real time.

None was linked to that nation’s tsunami warning system, which underestimated the full impact of the inundation that killed more than 18,000 people, left at least 350,000 homeless and caused meltdowns in three nuclear reactors.

Data from those GPS stations could have produced a more accurate warning within three minutes, including a better estimate of wave sizes and tremor magnitude, a team of European researchers has...

Go to a busy street in your community and count the next 25 adolescents who walk, bike, skateboard, stroll or saunter past. Odds are that two of those 25 kids (8.3% to be exact) would own up to having experienced 14 or more days in the last month that he or she considered "mentally unhealthy," according to a comprehensive report on the mental health of American youth issued Thursday.

Between 2005 and 2010, roughly 2 million American adolescents between 12 and 17 acknowledged that for more than half of the previous month, they routinely had felt sad, angry, disconnected, stressed out, unloved...

It's 1.7 miles long. Its surface is covered in a sticky black substance similar to the gunk at the bottom of a barbecue. If it impacted Earth it would probably result in global extinction. Good thing it is just making a flyby.

Asteroid 1998 QE2 will make its closest pass to Earth on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. PDT.

Scientists are not sure where this unusually large space rock, which was discovered 15 years ago, originated from. But the mysterious sooty substance on its surface could indicate it may be the result of a comet that flew too close to the sun, said Amy Mainzer, who tracks near-Earth objects...

Inscrutable ice giants Neptune and Uranus have only a thin rind of windy weather over their fluid contents, a team of planetary scientists say. The research published in the journal Nature relies on decades-old data from the Voyager 2 spacecraft -- and may help scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics of alien gas-giant exoplanets beyond our solar system.

Although Neptune and Uranus are members of our own planetary neighborhood, their atmospheric dynamics have remained a mystery shrouded in thick cloud, said study coauthor Adam Showman, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona...

An invasion of alien "crazy ants" is making many residents of the U.S. Gulf Coast long for the old days of pesky, biting fire ants.

Like fire ants, these South American invaders seem to be fond of electrical equipment. But unlike their stinging red counterparts, the tawny crazy ants create mega-colonies, sometimes in homes, and push out local populations of ants and arthropods, a University of Texas researcher warns.

Here’s a bit of the behavior that earns the "crazy ant" name.

"When you talk to folks who live in the invaded areas, they tell you they want their fire ants back," said Ed...

Attention swimmers: More than half of the public pools tested in a new study contained bacterial evidence that someone may have  pooped in the pool.

Investigators from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention worked with state and local public health departments last summer to collect samples from pool filters at 161 pools in the metro-Atlanta area. Some of the pools were public, some were in private clubs and some were in water parks.

Over the winter, researchers used genetic tests to identify several types of pathogens in the filter samples. Among the 161 samples, 93 -- or 58% --...

Nearly 1.5 miles beneath Earth's surface, scientists have discovered pockets of water that have remained in isolation for more than a billion years.

What you see in that picture above is probably some of the oldest water on the planet, and scientists say it could be teeming with microscopic life.

The ancient water bubbling up from the floor of a zinc and copper mine near Timmins in Canada's Ontario province looks crystal clear, but it would not make a cool refreshing drink.

Scientists say it is warm to the touch and much saltier than seawater.

The water is also rich in dissolved hydrogen and...

Just got dumped? Researchers say you are more likely to turn to “I Knew You Were Trouble” than “Call Me Maybe.”

That’s because what you’re likely to be looking for is the support of an empathetic pal, they say. On the other hand, if someone dents the back of your car in the mall parking lot, the happy song could cheer you up.

The researchers, writing in the August issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, wanted to know what prompted people to seek congruent music, art and film and what circumstances prompted them to find noncongruent art.

“Music,...

"Star Trek" fans, set your alarms. And fans of the astronauts who live and work on the International Space Station, set your alarms too.

At 9 a.m. Pacific time Thursday, the filmmakers behind "Star Trek Into Darkness" and a handful of NASA astronauts will come together in a live Google Hangout to discuss how science fiction is becoming a reality. And you can watch it live, right here.

(The video player above will stream the hangout starting at 9 a.m. Thursday.)

The hangout is scheduled to last about 45 minutes, and there are some pretty big names participating...

The U.S. military has faced two epidemics over the last decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One is suicide. The annual rate of military personnel taking their own lives has doubled to about 20 per 100,000. That translated to a record 324 suicides in the Army last year.

The other is concussion, also known as mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI. The proliferation of roadside bombs has subjected thousands of troops to brain-rattling explosions.

Several studies have suggested a link between the two epidemics — that service members who suffered concussions are at greater risk for suicide.

Scientists have added two species of ape and monkey to the evolutionary tree, filling in a 10-million-year gap in the fossil record from a period when apes and Old World monkeys diverged.

Fossil specimens of jaws and teeth, collected by Ohio University researchers in the Rukwa Rift Basin of Tanzania, date the primates to about 25.2 million years ago. Each was probably  evolving separately by then, according to the scientists, whose work was published in the journal Nature.

Rukwapithecus fleaglei was identified as a hominoid predecessor to the modern ape or chimpanzee, and Nsungwepithecus...

Though NASA’s Kepler spacecraft isn’t dead yet, a serious malfunction aboard the space telescope may mean its days of planet hunting have come to an untimely end.

"I wouldn’t call Kepler down and out just yet," John Grunsfeld, the head of NASA's science missions, said at a news conference Wednesday.

PHOTOS: Kepler's discoveries

Even with faint hopes still alive -- and with plenty of unanalyzed data in the can that will keep scientsits busy for years -- astronomers and planetary scientists expressed their dismay through social media.

Geoff Marcy, a UC Berkeley astrophysicist...

Mosquitoes infected with the malaria parasite are significantly more attracted to human odors -- in this case smelly socks -- than are uninfected mosquitoes, researchers reported Wednesday.

Scientists collected human odor on nylon socks -- by having someone wear them for 20 hours -- and put them, along with clean socks, into an enclosure with mosquitoes. The bugs infected with P. falciparum showed more landings and more probing of the smelly socks.

None of the mosquitoes -- infected or not -- were especially drawn to the socks with no human odor.

The work by researchers at the London School of...

Frogs that were imported for pregnancy tests and set loose in California carry a deadly fungus responsible for wiping out vast numbers of amphibians worldwide, scientists have found.

Populations of African clawed frogs (Xenopus laevis) have thrived for decades in the state’s drainage ditches and ponds, but their link with the deadly Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis fungus was unverified until a research team from Stanford University and San Francisco State University recently tested museum samples for the fungus.

“Until this report, there had been no conclusive evidence that Xenopus...

Is NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting telescope dead?

That was the rumor circulating Wednesday, nearly a week after the space telescope went into safe mode. NASA will host a news conference at 1 p.m. Pacific time “to discuss the status of the agency's Kepler Space Telescope.” To some, it sounds ominous.

“Not sure I like the sound of this,” tweeted Nancy Atkinson, a senior writer and editor for Universe Today.

PHOTOS: Kepler's discoveries

“Kepler, we have a problem,” added Paul Crowther, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Sheffield in Britain.

A...

Welcoming a child into your home can be one of the most wondrous and transforming experiences of a lifetime.

It can also be the most challenging time of your life, seeming to test the human limits of sleeplessness, patience and selflessness. Figuring out the best approach can be difficult when you're verging on zombiehood.

Noted pediatrician and child development specialist Dr. Harvey Karp joins us in a live video chat at 1 p.m. PDT today to share insights into the techniques he details in his "The Happiest Baby" series of books and DVDs, including the infant-calming five S's and the tantrum-...

The Ocean Conservancy has run the numbers, and over the course of a single day in September 2012, more than 500,000 volunteers from across the globe collected 10 million pounds of trash from beaches and waterways.

The top three most common items collected were cigarettes and cigarette filters (2.1 million), food wrappers (1.1 million), and plastic beverage bottles (1 million).

But at least it won't end up in the oceans.

Here in California, 35,000 people volunteered to help clean the beaches and waterways in our state and removed 304,529 pounds of garbage.

[Updated 10:53 a.m. PDT May 15: ...

There she goes again!

The same region of the sun that brought you three powerful solar flares in a 24-hour span from Sunday night to Monday evening let loose Tuesday night with another explosive flash of ultraviolet radiation and sent tons of its own solar material flying through space.

The flare, which peaked at 6:48 p.m. EDT, was the fourth this week to be categorized as X-class, the most powerful type of solar flare.

As usual, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory caught beautiful images of the sun's fireworks, which you can see above. (The flare is the area of bright white at the far left of...

Are Americans getting mixed messages about how much sodium they should be consuming? Lately, yes, and some of those messages are muddled because studies themselves are muddled, a panel of doctors has concluded.

The Institute of Medicine panel reconfirmed evidence that high sodium in diets is associated with increased risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease. But other evidence in recent medical studies, such as a link between high sodium intake and gastric cancer, for example, was found to be inconclusive.

The analysis also casts doubt on a key direction of the salt wars: that substantial...

Angelina Jolie’s revelation that she underwent a preventative double mastectomy may seem like a shocking move to some. But for many women who have dangerous hereditary risks coded into their genes, this kind of surgery before cancer strikes serves as a viable alternative that's been growing in popularity over the last few decades, doctors say.

For patients with a dangerous mutation in the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes that dramatically raises their risk of breast cancer, there are a few options available to them, said Maureen Chung, a breast surgical oncologist and medical director of the Margie...

Angelina Jolie’s decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy to reduce breast cancer risk was a natural move given that she carried a dangerously faulty gene, cancer surgeons said, but it’s a decision that really befits only a select group of women.

Only about 5% of breast cancer patients carry a dangerous mutation in their BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes, said Dr. Julian Kim, chief of surgical oncology at the University Hospitals Case Medical Center and chief medical officer of the UH Seidman Cancer Center in Cleveland.

"Now this is a very, very small segment of the population that...

Don’t count on sulfur dioxide to bridle climate change. The ability of that pollutant to reflect the sun is not quite what it was assumed to be, according to new research.

Sulfur dioxide -- a common pollutant from burning fossil fuels, contributes to the formation of aerosol particles in the atmosphere, which reflect sunlight. Figuring out just how much this can counteract greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide and other gases has remained one of the bigger uncertainties in climate modeling.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry now say that climate models probably overstate...

After years of decline, the rate of smokeless tobacco use among young people has leveled off, new research shows.

In 2011, 5.2% of middle school and high school students in the U.S. reported using snuff, chewing tobacco or dipping tobacco at least once in the 30 days before they were interviewed for the National Youth Tobacco Survey, which is conducted by the Centers for Disease Patrol and Prevention. That’s essentially the same as the 5.3% of young people who were considered smokeless tobacco users in 2000.

The products are continuing to fall out of favor for the youngest kids in the...

The sun put on another fireworks display Monday evening, releasing a dramatic flash of ultraviolet radiation and sending solar matter hurtling through space.

It was the third major solar flare in 24 hours and the most powerful of 2013.

All three solar flares originated from sun spots in an area of the sun known as AR 11748....

A warming climate is melting the glaciers of Mount Everest, shrinking the frozen cloak of Earth’s highest peak by 13% in the last 50 years, researchers have found.

Rocks and natural debris previously covered by snow are appearing now as the snow line has retreated 590 feet, according to Sudeep Thakuri, a University of Milan scientist who led the research.

The pessimistic view of Earth’s tallest peak was presented during a meeting Tuesday of the American Geophysical Union in Cancun, Mexico.

Researchers said they believe the observed changes could be due to human-generated greenhouse...

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Tuesday said it planned to appeal a National Labor Relations Board judge’s order to rescind disciplinary actions against five engineers and scientists who shared emails at work about a Supreme Court decision on background security checks for JPL employees.

Administrative Law Judge William G. Kocol ordered JPL, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, to remove disciplinary letters related to the case from the employee files of the five who were accused of violating spam rules, and to post a notice of his ruling in a...

Late Monday night, friends and colleagues started sending me Angelina Jolie's op-ed about her decision to have a double mastectomy. Like Jolie, I have the mutation in my BRCA1 gene that pushed my lifetime risk of developing breast cancer to nearly 90%. (It also raised my risk of ovarian cancer above 50%.) Also like Jolie, I chose to get a double mastectomy to reduce my risk of breast cancer to less than 5%. In 2007, I wrote a first-person story in the Los Angeles Times about finding out I had this mutation and how I decided what to do about it.

Jolie is an icon of beauty -- and her disclosure...

Citizen scientists, environmentalists and anyone who lives near a power plant -- your services are requested. Climate change scientist Kevin Robert Gurney needs your help in a grand undertaking: the mapping of all the power plants in the world.

It's a big job, and he and the people in his lab cannot do it alone.

Gurney, an associate professor at Arizona State University, builds carbon dioxide emission data models that help him and others better understand how carbon moves around the planet and how it effects climate change.

To build more accurate models, he needs to know where exactly CO₂is...

Want to satisfy your full day’s requirement of salt, fat and calories? Sit down in a restaurant and order a meal.

After an exhaustive analysis of 3,507 possible ways to order 685 meals at 19 restaurants chains in Canada, researchers found that the average meal contained 151% of the recommended daily value of sodium. That means a single breakfast, lunch or dinner had enough sodium to get you through an entire day and a half. Overall, more than 80% of the meals studied contained at least a full day’s supply of sodium, according to a report published online Mondayin JAMA Internal...

A Soyuz capsule has landed safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan, bringing to a safe end the space odyssey of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, whose video of David Bowie's "A Space Oddity" has gone viral.

The capsule containing Hadfield, along with fellow International Space Station crew members Tom Marshburn and Roman Romanenko, landed on its side, kicking up a cloud of dust, at 8:31 Tuesday morning local time. Crews were on site to extract them -- Hadfield was the last to emerge -- and take the three to a nearby medical tent. They had been in space for nearly five months.

During his sojourn...

A National Labor Relations Board judge has ordered NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge to rescind disciplinary actions against five scientists who shared emails at work about a Supreme Court decision on background security checks.

Administrative Law Judge William G. Kocol also ordered JPL to purge disciplinary letters related to the case from the employee files of Dennis Byrnes, Scott Maxwell, Larry D’Addario, Robert Nelson and William Bruce Barnerdt.

The five were accused of violating rules against unsolicited Spam and bulk-e-mail. However, Kocol, in a 31-page...

These days, it’s not just finding an exoplanet. It’s how you find that Earth-like body.

Scientists using sophisticated telescopes and arrays can detect a planet revolving around a distant star by looking at radial velocity of the star (a faint wobble) or a “transit” of that planet across the star (a faint dimming).

But no one has ever found one via “induced relativistic beaming of light” from the host star.

Why would that be a big deal? It happens to be a method that relies on Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And it also lets observers...

How’s this for spring cleaning? Scientists have discovered that a carnivorous plant deletes so much of its own junk DNA that it has hardly any left. The finding, published online in Nature, hints that such noncoding DNA may not be as important as some scientists believe.

"Junk DNA is probably well named as junk. There doesn’t seem to be any glorious reason or function behind it," said Victor Albert, a University at Buffalo molecular evolutionary biologist and one of the lead authors on the study.

Only 2% of the human genome is actually made up of functional elements such as  genes,...

Ranchers often argue that cattle grazing is the best way to combat cheatgrass, an aggressive invader that has taken over vast areas of the Great Basin, destroying the native sagebrush ecosystem and fueling huge wildfires.

But a study published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology arrives at the opposite conclusion. Reseachers who studied 75 Great Basin sites invaded by cheatgrass found that greater grazing intensity promoted the alien’s spread.

“Our findings raise serious concerns regarding proposals to use cattle grazing to control [cheatgrass] in these systems where remnant...

The cover of "A Space Oddity" by Chris Hadfield, International Space Station commander, is going galactically viral Monday.

But it was a decidedly terrestrial affair. And it centered on a Silver Lake producer and a Canadian singer who once did vocals for Bowie, say those who were involved.

Hadfield, who already reset the bar for social media with his tweets from space, is a talented singer and guitarist. He sat in with many a Canadian musician, and joined singer-songwriter Ed Robertson of Barenaked Ladies last month for a rendition of “Is Somebody Singing,” which the two co-wrote.

The sun erupted for the second time in less than 24 hours Monday morning, releasing the most powerful solar flare so far of 2013.

Monday's solar flare, which peaked at 9 a.m. Pacific time, came just 14 hours after the second largest solar flare of 2013, which occurred on Sunday evening.

A solar flare is a huge explosion in the sun's atmosphere that sends out a burst of radiation. The Earth's atmosphere protects us from that radiation, but some satellites could be affected.

Photos: Amazing images from space

Monday's solar flare is classified as an X2.8, according to NASA. Sunday's solar flare...

Carbon dioxide measurements in the Earth's atmosphere did not break the symbolic milestone of 400 parts per million at a Hawaiian observatory last week, according to a revised reading from the nation's climate observers.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) revised its May 9 reading at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, saying it remained fractions of a point below the level of 400 ppm, at 399.89.

Individual readings at any of NOAA's observation stations are subject to revision on a regular basis. Sometimes a data point is moved to another set when the sets are adjusted...

One of the first warnings new mothers hear is that offering babies formula soon after birth can lead to problems with breast-feeding.  Sating infants' hunger with formula can prevent them from nursing vigorously, interfering with milk production; letting them use a bottle and nipple can interfere with their ability to latch properly at the breast.  Some research has shown that mothers who offer formula in the hospital stop breast-feeding sooner than mothers who don't.

But a new study, published online Monday by the journal Pediatrics, suggests that there are situations in which limited formula...

Hadfield, from the Canadian Space Agency, has been one chatty dude up there in the International Space Station, tweeting constantly during the Expedition 35 mission, which included a precedent-setting emergency spacewalk this weekend to repair an ammonia coolant leak.

Hadfield has a huge following on Twitter: Some 773,118...

Astronauts replaced a leaking component on the International Space Station after a 5-hour, 30-minute spacewalk, NASA reported.

Engineers Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn completed their spacewalk at 11:14 a.m. PDT Saturday, after gingerly gliding out to one of the station's trusses, where ammonia coolant had been seen leaking since Thursday. The coolant is used to control the temperature of one of eight solar arrays that power the station.

The pair, who had worked in tandem during spacewalks twice before, removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare...

There will be no meteor showers this weekend, or ring-of-fire solar eclipses, but if you head outside around twilight, you’ll get an excellent view of Jupiter and Venus around a slender crescent moon.

As night begins to fall on Saturday and Sunday evenings, look to the sky to find Jupiter in the same vicinity as the new moon. Then look below the moon to find Venus.

The planets will look like white points of light, not so different than stars, but they will be bright enough to be visible even in a light-polluted city like Los Angeles without the aid of a telescope.

Photos: Amazing images...

In a spacewalk, Astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn replaced a pump component that has been gushing ammonia coolant, NASA reported Saturday.

The spacewalk got underway at 5:44 a.m. PDT and was expected to last more than six hours, according to NASA. The astronauts removed and replaced the faulty pump controller box on the far port truss of the International Space Station. No evidence of a continued ammonia leak was evident as NASA restarted the faulty coolant loop.

Live footage on NASA TV showed the two working in painstakingly slow motion in alternating darkness and light as the...

After a four-week spring break, NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has set its sights on the next drill target: Cumberland, a rock lying about 9 feet away from where the rover first broke ground in Yellowknife Bay.

The new target will be a greater challenge than the last, with more bumpy rock containing more erosion-resistant, mineral-rich concretions that formed when water once soaked the stone. 

Mission scientists wanted to play it safe for the first time the rover wielded its drill, said Ashwin Vasavada, a deputy project scientist on the Mars Science Laboratory at Jet Propulsion Laboratory...

Wondering where Earth’s climate is headed with an atmosphere that is 400 parts per million carbon dioxide?

An arctic bare of ice sheets, forested in pine and fir, with summer temperatures about 14 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today were typical some 3.5 million years ago, when atmospheric CO2 measures hovered around the 400 ppm range, according to researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The findings, based on sediment cores drilled from a Russian lake, don’t bode well for the current model of human-forced climate change, the researchers warn. They suggest that...

WASHINGTON -- The ratio of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has surpassed 400 parts per million in an average daily reading at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, the highest concentration of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas in millions of years.

While several atmospheric readings in the Arctic have recently exceeded 400 ppm of carbon dioxide, the Mauna Loa daily average readings are considered the benchmark indicators of the Earth’s atmospheric makeup.

Climate scientists have calculated that the world needs to keep carbon dioxide emissions from crossing the 400-ppm...

The sun is ramping up toward solar maximum -- the white-hot peak of activity in an 11-year cycle -- and NASA has been snapping images of the phenomenon every 12 seconds for three years.

The space agency put together a three-minute video showing images taken by the Solar Dynamic Observatory since spring 2010. As the Los Angeles Times' Deborah Netburn reported last month, the NASA video stitches together two SDO images per day over the three-year period.

Alex Young, a heliophysicist at Goddard Space Flight Center, narrates the video to point up some of the sun's best-of momentsin that time...

Astronauts from the International Space Station will start their space walk Saturday about 5:45 a.m. Pacific time, in an effort to locate and fix an ammonia leak in a coolant system, NASA officials said Friday.

The unscheduled emergency walk was "precedent setting" for the station, although similar impromptu tasks had been performed during the Space Shuttle program, said Norm Knight, NASA chief flight director.

“The team is ready to go,” International Space Station program manager Michael Suffredini said.

“Things are really progressing in the right direction,” added...

Some say that you can’t put a price on precious natural resources. As of this week, you can.

The public and private tab for conserving the nation’s fish, wildlife and natural resources is close to $40 billion a year, according to a study released this week.

The analysis, commissioned by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, considered the jobs, tax revenue and other economic effects from federal state and private investment in conservation.

The total -- $38.8 billion — stimulates as much as $93.2 billion in economic activity, the study found.

A coalition of more than 1,...

Two federal agencies on Friday announced a major review of how seismic testing for oil and gas deposits affects marine mammals and fish in deep waters off the Gulf of Mexico.

So-called seismic surveys entail blasts from air guns or other ship-borne devices that send out powerful sound waves that reflect the shape and extent of oil and gas fields under the ocean floor. Industry officials say the practice is necessary for efficient, safe exploration in deep seas.

The testing has long been controversial. Environmental groups have taken companies connected to the tests to court many times, ...

Astronauts on the International Space Station may take a spacewalk Saturday to repair an ammonia leak.

The gas, used to cool one of the station’s solar arrays, began oozing from the left side of the station’s truss structure Thursday, officials said.

NASA reported that the six-member Expedition 35 crew, commanded by Chris Hadfield, was not in danger, and that the station is operating normally while crew members and mission managers work to reroute power through another of the station’s eight power channels.

"The whole team is ticking like clockwork, readying for tomorrow. I...

Swing, batter, batter! In less time than it takes to say that phrase, Major League Baseball sluggers have their bat across the plate, and the best of them are golfing the shot over the outfield wall.

How does the brain "know" when to swing? Researchers at UC Berkeley believe they've found the internal architecture that lets a batter get ahead of the fastball, and allows the rest of us to pour a beer and find our seat in the stands. They pinpointed a region of the brain's middle temporal complex that can "predict" spatial position ahead of its actual location in the real world.

For example, in...

Less than a week after the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would investigate the safety of added caffeine in U.S. food and beverage products, Wrigley North America has decided to put its bid to market a caffeinated gum on hold out of respect for the agency's deliberations, the company's president, Casey Keller announced in a statement issued to the Associated Press.

The move appears to be a bow to FDA Deputy Commissioner Michael R. Taylor's public suggestion last week that "together, we should immediately be looking at what voluntary restraint can be used by industry as FDA gets...

In the Hyades star cluster, located 150 light years from Earth, scientists discovered two white dwarf stars that have Earth-like materials in their atmosphere.

A white dwarf star is a dim remnant of a star that was once like our sun. Usually its atmosphere would contain only light elements like hydrogen and helium because heavier elements like silicon and carbon would sink quickly into its core.

But it is exactly silicon, and just a bit of carbon -- the same stuff that rocky planets and asteroids are made of -- that scientists discovered in the atmosphere of the two white dwarf stars.

Photos:...

Live video of Thursday's solar eclipse will be streaming on latimes.com beginning at 2:30 p.m. PDT.

The video is courtesy of Slooh Space Camera, which has several telescopes around the world, and which often live-streams celestial events.

On Thursday, the Slooh team will be streaming from a telescope in Australia, where the full eclipse should be visible -- weather permitting.

PHOTOS: Amazing images from space

In a perfect world, you would just go outside with special sun-gazing glasses and see this event for yourself, but unless you live in the South Pacific, you are out of luck.

The path of...

Researchers working with identical twin mice say the adult brain continues to grow with the challenges it faces – and with a willingness to create those challenges.

Scientists in Germany put 40 twin mice in an enclosure that offered all sorts of things to do – perhaps like setting the country mouse loose in the city. They looked at why twins develop distinct personalities.

That distinction, the researchers said Thursday in the journal Science, is related to the birth of neurons in the hippocampus. And, the new neurons depended on how adventurous the mice were in checking out their...

An eclipse of the sun will occur on Thursday and you can watch it live online, right here.

Ideally you would go outside with a pair of very dark sun-gazing glasses, or a cardboard box with a pinhole in it, and see this event for yourself, but unless you live in Australia, Papau New Guinea, or the Solomon Islands, you are out of luck.

The path of this eclipse sweeps inconveniently through some of the most remote regions on Earth.

Luckily, the folks at Slooh Space Camera, a website that live streams celestial events, will have a telescope set up in Australia and will be streaming a live feed of...

At chain restaurants across the country, the ink is scarcely dry on new menus posting the calorie counts of food and beverage options. But already, public health experts are debating whether there might be better ways to influence Americans' nutritional choices when they're out and about.

How about posting a menu item's calorie content in "sweat equivalents" (it'll take you 90 minutes of power-walking to work off the calories in this piece of cheesecake and 30 minutes to work off the fruit-and-yogurt combo)? How about listing food items on the menu in the order of their nutritional density or...

The bleak chamber of an MRI machine is among the least funny places on earth, but a group of German researchers is using the device to probe the origins of laughter in the human brain.

In a paper published Monday in the journal PLOS One, scientists charted which areas of the brain experienced increased blood flow when study participants were exposed to recordings of different types of laughter. What they found was that the brain responded differently to hearing certain types of laughter.

Examination of so-called "laughter perception networks" could provide clues to the evolution of the brain,...

Here's a new mystery for space observers: Astronomers have recently discovered a series of hydrogen clouds floating in a starless stretch of space between the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies.

The clouds are enormous, or relatively small, depending on your reference point. They are much smaller than the two galaxies they lie between, but each of the clouds is itself a million times the mass of our solar system. Researchers say the clouds are roughly the size of dwarf galaxies, but they don't have any stars in them.

"What makes this discovery especially puzzling is you have these apparently...

Birds do it. Bees do it. And bats do it too: They use their weirdly gifted tongues to lap up as much nectar with every lick. The sugar-loving bats sport hundreds of hair-like structures on their tongue tips that stand on end when erectile tissue in their tongues fill with blood.

Those hairs hold extra nectar suspended between the erect bristles, according to a study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – rather like a honey dipper picks up more sticky sweet stuff in between its ridges.

Study lead author Cally Harper, a biomechanist at Brown University, compared it to the m...

Do you dream of living on Mars? Then turn on your webcam. You've got an application video to make.

Mars One, a Netherlands-based group that wants to turn the colonizing of Mars into a reality television phenomenon, has started accepting applications for its astronaut selection program.

In just two weeks, more than 78,000 people from more than 120 countries have applied.

QUIZ: How well do you know the red planet?

You don't need previous experience in rocket science, astronomy, or really anything to apply for the Mars One astronaut selection program -- but you will need to be at least 18 years...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced the recall of several dietary supplements that contain the undeclared drug tadalafil, which is used to treat erectile dysfunction.

The products -- SexVoltz, Velextra, and Amerect -- were manufactured by BeaMonstar Products of Queen Creek, Ariz., and were distributed nationally, according to the FDA. 

"These undeclared active ingredients pose a threat to consumers because tadalafil may interact with nitrates found in some prescription drugs such as nitroglycerin and may lower blood pressure to dangerous levels," read an FDA notice of the...

Half of all patients who have tested positive for hepatitis C have not had follow-up testing to see if they are still infected, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That means many people are living with the disease and not receiving the necessary treatment to prevent health problems, officials said this week.

Hepatitis C is the leading cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer and is the most common reason for liver transplants in the United States.

The findings prompted the CDC to issue new guidelines urging healthcare providers to do a follow-up test on anyone who tests...

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has emerged from its "spring break" and is back to work, officials at Jet Propulsion Laboratory said this week. Up next on the agenda: Drilling the second target at Yellowknife Bay.

The Mars Science Laboratory mission made big news shortly before its break, turning up key evidence of life-friendly environments in its first drill sample, said mission deputy project scientist Ashwin Vasavada.

The revelation came just in time. Mars slipped behind the sun during the month of April, in a phenomenon known as solar conjunction. Blocked from earthly view, Curiosity was left...

The links between sleep and cancer are now so many, you could build a chain. A new study has found that for men who suffer insomnia and unwelcome wakefulness, the risk of prostate cancer is greater than for those whose sleep is undisrupted.

That research expands on a growing body of evidence that men and women whose sleep is short, broken or of poor quality are at higher risk of developing a wide range of cancers.

Research has long linked overnight shift work -- and the circadian rhythm disruptions that are common with it -- as a risk factor for breast cancer and endometrial cancers in women....

The history of Europe is written in its people's DNA.

The Huns and the Slavs made incursions into Eastern Europe about 1,500 years ago. Migrants moved from Ireland to England in recent centuries. Populations in Italy and Spain have been comparatively stable.

None of this is breaking news. But scientists were able to see it anew by examining the patterns of genes in 2,257 people now living in 40 countries on the continent.

It's surprising "how much past history was still evident in the patterns we've seen," said Peter Ralph, a computational biologist at USC who reported the findings Tuesday in...

Adolescents who went to McDonald’s and Subway in Los Angeles bought about the same number of calories at each, despite Subway's reputation as a healthier place to eat, researchers said.

The menus are not the point, lead researcher Dr. Lenard Lesser of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute said by phone. “Our study was not based on what people have the ability to pick, our study was based on what adolescents actually selected in a real-world setting.”

The adolescents bought an average of 1,038 calories at McDonald’s and 955 calories at Subway. The calorie...

There's a fair amount of circumstantial evidence that regular exercise reduces a woman's risk of developing breast cancer. But contradictory findings, and lingering questions as to how physical activity would work to ward off breast cancer, have clouded the picture, apparently leaving some women on the couch, waiting for that scientific fog to lift.

C'mon ladies, get up and take the girls to the gym. A new study shows that without making any other changes in their lifestyles, young women who got an average of 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic exercise five days a week showed...

Would Ice Age man understand us? It may depend on the words we choose. Digging through languages in Eurasia for "fossil" words that have escaped erosion over time, researchers say they have identified an ancestral language that existed as far as 15,000 years ago.

This ancient language, described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may have given rise to several different language groups — including Indo-European, which boasts roughly 3 billion speakers and contains such far-flung languages as Spanish and Hindi.

The researchers first had to find cognates across the...

As the East Coast of the United States braces for the deafening invasion of the 17-year cicada, a motley collection of predators -- including some humans -- are licking their chops in anticipation of an immense insect feast.

Billions of cicada nymphs will soon spring from their hiding place below ground and eventually fly to the treetops for a courting, mating and egg-laying ritual of biblical proportions.

The massive emergence, which University of Maryland entomology professor Michael Raupp likened to a "huge tsunami," will roll from North Carolina to New York. Although the reason for the...

An estimated 220,000 Americans undergo some type of bariatric surgery each year, and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has revealed that he is one of them.

The high-profile Republican – who hasn’t revealed his weight but is estimated to tip the scales at between 300 and 350 pounds – said he went under the knife for a 40-minute lap band procedure on a Saturday morning in February. In less than three months, he has lost about 40 pounds, according to sources cited in various reports.

A lap band procedure involves fitting an inflatable silicone ring around the stomach to reduce food...

What does a volcano look like from 438 miles above the Earth's surface? Thanks to NASA and its new Landsat Data Continuity Mission satellite (LDCM), you can see for yourself.

On April 29, the satellite captured two images of the Paluweh volcano spewing a plume of smoke that drifted for miles off the 5-mile wide volcanic island. The volcano, which looks like a wrinkly green blob from space, sits in Indonesia's Flores Sea.

The satellite actually sent two images of the volcano using different imaging techniques.

At first glance, it's the color image taken with the satellite's Operational Land...

In schoolbook drawings, nuclei -- the protons and neutrons at the center of atoms -- are often represented as neat, spherical little bunches with nice round electron clouds circling about them.

Many nuclei are, in fact, sphere-shaped, but some are not: Relationships between their constituent parts deform them into bundles shaped more like a football or a discus. And physicists have predicted that in some cases, atomic nuclei could take on even more unusual shapes: pyramids, bananas, pears.

In the past, scientists have gotten glimpses of the strangely shaped nuclei, but have never been able to...

Some talented humans can fold their tongues into a three-leaf clover, but some bats accomplish an even greater feat: Hair-like structures on their tongue tips stand to attention when they lap up nectar, allowing them to collect more.

This "nectar mop," described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could become a useful model for future medical devices, researchers said.

Scientists have seen many methods of nectar collection. Butterflies suck liquid with a straw-like proboscis, and hummingbirds have forked tongues that help them 'grab' droplets during feeding.

But nectar-...

In an experiment, 18 men and women were encouraged to let their minds wander while researchers played recordings of white noise mixed with an infant’s cries. Those cries abruptly raised attention levels for women, brain scans showed. But men’s brains remained in a resting state, according to study results published in the journal Neuroreport.

“New...

The Food and Drug Administration is warning physicians that women who suffer migraine headaches and are pregnant or may become pregnant should not use the drugs valproate or valproic acid to prevent the severe headaches, in light of new evidence showing those taking the drugs during pregnancy have children with lower IQ scores than women who do not take them.

That warning represents a strengthening of a boxed warning that already appears on these prescription medications, which are used to control epileptic seizures, to treat bipolar disorder, and to prevent and relieve migraine headaches....

The nearly 3 in 10 white girls of high school age who use indoor tanning beds likely will soon come face-to-face with a new and stiffer warning aimed at young people eager to get that sun-kissed glow in a hurry: Don't.

Faced with mounting evidence that indoor tanning greatly increases cancer risk among younger users, the Food & Drug Administration proposed Monday to require tanning booths and beds to carry a warning encouraging young people not to use the devices.

Businesses that use devices and beds that use UV-A and UV-B rays to promote tanning currently are required to post signs warning...

Ports like Los Angeles and Long Beach are key to the global economy: crossroads where billions of dollars in cargo arrive and depart each year, floating on board thousands of vessels from all over the world.

Increasingly, however, large ports are also playing a key role in Earth's ecosystem, as species from all corners stow away on ships and make their way into ports -- sometimes, with devastating consequences for native wildlife.  For example, the Chinese mitten crab, which comes from the Pacific Coast of China and Korea, made its way to the U.S. West Coast on ships during the early 1990s and...

Attention dieters: If you want to maximize your chances of success, don’t go to the grocery store on an empty stomach.

So says a new JAMA Internal Medicine study from two members of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, where researchers investigate “the psychology behind what people eat and how often they eat it,” as this website puts it.

The study authors – Brian Wansink and Aner Tal – asked 68 study subjects to fast for five hours and before reporting to the lab for the experiment. The subjects were asked to do their grocery shopping in a simulated online...

More than 17% of children considered to be at risk of committing suicide have guns in the home that could make a passing destructive impulse deadly, and between 15% and 30% of those adolescents told researchers they had access to those guns, to bullets, or to both.

Those figures, presented over the weekend at the American Academy of Pediatrics' annual meeting, underscore a growing interest in pediatricians in weighing in on gun violence and its toll on children. The new research was unveiled during a session of the physicians' confab devoted to understanding the role of violence in media, the...

Forget boiling, or antiseptic wipes: The best way to clean a Binky may be putting it in your own mouth.

A parent who sucks on a baby's pacifier to clean it is loading it up with hundreds of good types of bacteria that live in the adult mouth. That bacteria is transferred via the pacifier to the infant's mouth.

It may sound gross, but evidence suggests that those bacteria may help reduce instances of allergy development in babies.

In a new studypublished in Pediatrics, researchers followed 184 infants recruited from a Swedish hospital from birth until most of them were 3 years old. The...

Pull out the reclining lawn chairs and get yourself to the darkest area you can find: The Eta Aquarid meteor shower is peaking this weekend, and if you get lucky, you can catch up to 30 "shooting stars" per hour.

You may also want to set your alarm clock: Sky watchers say the best time to catch the light show is in the hour or two just before dawn on Sunday.

Here in Southern California that means you'll want to start your meteor hunting around 4 a.m.

The Eta Aquarid meteor shower occurs each year in late April or early May when the Earth passes through a stream of dust and debris left in the...

For a sand tiger shark embryo, the uterine experience is not so much "safe and nurturing" as it is "Hunger Games" arena.

In each of a pregnant sand tiger shark's two uteri, several egg sacs are fertilized, but only one baby emerges -- a 3-foot-long cannibalistic victor who has killed and devoured its siblings.

What the embryos experience in the womb is really less like a battle and more of a race. The first embryo to break free of its egg sack and start killing and eating its siblings will be the one who eventually gets to swim out of mom.

PHOTOS: Weird sea creatures, strange fish

This...

A man with no risk factors for prostate cancer can go his whole life without ever taking a PSA test, according to the American Urological Assn.

In a new clinical guideline unveiled Friday, the urologists said that only men between the ages of 55 and 69 should even consider getting a PSA screening test if they have no signs or symptoms of prostate cancer. Men should only get tested after discussing all the pros and cons with their doctors, and if they decide to get tested, they should not get tested again for at least two years, the guideline advises.

The PSA test measures prostate-specific...

Feeling so stressed you can't concentrate? Try stepping back a moment and thinking about what's important to you.

That's the conclusion of a study published recently in the journal PLOS One that examined the beneficial qualities of self-affirmation in times of heart-pounding stress.

Mind you, this isn't the Stuart Smalley "doggone it, people like me!" style of self-affirmation, but it's easily practiced in everyday life, says lead author J. David Creswell, an associate professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"People under high stress can foster better problem-...