Most Emailed Science News

When they do their thing, female Chinese fruit bats add oral sex to get the males to prolong the act, scientists now find, suggesting the behavior confers evolutionary benefits.

GOLDEN, Colo. A space rock explosion earlier this month over an island region of Indonesia is now being viewed as perhaps the biggest object to tangle with the Earth in more than a decade.

A new panoramic image of the full night sky — with the Milky Way as its centerpiece — has been made by piecing together 3,000 individual photographs.

There's a special treat waiting for you this Halloween.

Big orange veggies are pretty strange as far as holiday symbols go, but there are actual historical reasons that we carve pumpkins every Halloween.

A husband and wife team of paleontologists has discovered a newfound species of armored dinosaur that lived 112 million years ago in what is now Montana.

Researchers have simulated a mini black hole in the lab, though luckily not the kind that could swallow up the Earth.

NASA's Mars rover Spirit is suffering a new bout of amnesia, one that comes after months of being stuck in deep Martian sand.

BEIJING - Qian Xuesen, a rocket scientist known as the father of China's space technology program, died Saturday in Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency said. He was 98.

It's no secret the stress of work can keep you up at nights. Now research shows that retirement can spur less fitful sleep, at least for people who are financially stable.

A mass phishing email scheme aims to steal banking information under the guise of the FDIC, just the most recent in a long line of scams, bilking millions from consumers.

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australian authorities were Sunday ordered to help extinguish a fire which broke out on a leaking oil rig that has been pumping thousands of barrels of oil into the Timor Sea for months.

Motion control and multi-touch have become common in devices ranging from Nintendo's Wii to Apple's iPhone. But a muscle-sensing system could someday allow gamers to play air "Guitar Hero" without a controller, or help harried parents with full hands open car doors.

NASA has discovered a large dent on its brand-new moon rocket after the booster splashed into the Atlantic Ocean at the end of a test flight this week.

We're often told, "You should sleep on it" before you make an important decision. Why is that? How does "sleeping on it" help your decision-making process?

The pitter-patter of little feet running from door to door this Halloween, dressed to the nines in their creepiest costumes sounds, like good old-fashioned fun.

Each year at Halloween, parents have concerns about trick-or-treating, and many believe that a danger far graver than chocolate overdose awaits their children in quiet neighborhoods: sex offenders.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japan's Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has revealed he dislikes whale meat, a newspaper reported Saturday, in an unusual confession for the prime minister of a country that defies Western criticism of whaling.

NEW HAVEN, West Virginia (AFP) - Eyeing lucrative markets in China, India and beyond, French firm Alstom on Friday unveiled the world's largest carbon capture facility at a coal plant -- a technology backers hope will fuel a new multi-billion dollar industry and keep the coal industry alive.

BEIJING (AFP) - Chinese meteorologists covered Beijing in snow Sunday after seeding clouds to bring winter weather to the capital in an effort to combat a lingering drought, state media reported.

BRUSSELS (AFP) - Europe's leaders wanted to send a clear message to Asian giants from this week's summit -- one about coughing up their share in the fight against climate change.

NASA engineers still aren't sure what went wrong with a pair of parachutes that failed during Wednesday's Ares I-X rocket test flight, causing damage to the spent booster when it splashed into the Atlantic Ocean harder than planned.

Some people really are just bad drivers. That's according to new research suggesting individuals born with a certain variant of a gene don't stay on the road as well as their counterparts.

Japan's first unmanned space cargo ship cast off from the International Space Station Friday as it nears the end of a successful maiden voyage.

BERLIN - German Chancellor Angela Merkel will urge the U.S. Congress to support an international pact to combat climate change in her address to the House and Senate next week.

Silken spider webs dating back some 140 million years have been discovered preserved in amber, scientists announce today.

BERLIN (AFP) - Al Gore is confident that US President Barack Obama will attend key UN climate change talks in Copenhagen, the former US vice president and Nobel peace laureate said in a German magazine interview.

Volcanic eruptions were responsible for a deadly ice age 450 million years ago, as well as - in an ironic twist - a period of global warming that preceded it, a new study finds.

There is no shortage of people seeking to turn ghosts into gold and spooks into silver. Hundreds of amateur ghost-hunting groups across the country offer tours of local haunts, allegedly spirit-infested hotels, mansions, cemeteries, and so on.

A piece of space junk orbiting Earth has forced NASA to tweak upcoming plans for the Friday departure of Japan's first cargo ship to the International Space Station.