A visual trick opens a window on brain development.

There are many ways to study the moon: Look through a telescope, measure its movement across the sky, or watch for mountains (with special sunglasses) as it passes across the sun during an eclipse, for example. But here’s one way that’s a little unusual: crash a rocket into it and see what happens. That’s exactly what NASA did in October, when scientists steered a rocket and a small spacecraft, called LCROSS, right into a dark crater on the moon’s surface. Just as a rock falling into a pond will cause a splash, the rocket’s crash on the solid moon sent up a cloud of dust and debris ...

Jewelweeds, or Impatiens, are pretty flowers that grow in wet, shady spots all over the Northern Hemisphere. According to a recent experiment, they seem to know their own flower family. The experiment suggests that these flowers can recognize each other—or at least, recognize whether or not they came from the same mother plant. Together with other experiments, these results show that if the plants are recognizing their kin, it’s not through their leaves, it’s through the roots. Guillermo P. Murphy and Susan Dudley are a pair of botanists, or scientists who study plants, from McMaster ...

Skulls thought to be from three different dinosaurs may actually be from the same type of dino at three different ages.

The holes in the jaw bone of a world-famous T. rex suggest the dino died from a parasite infection.

Introducing the solar system's largest known ring around a planet.

It sounds like a science experiment designed by Willy Wonka: Take a lot of junk food, feed it to some rats, and see what happens. Scientist Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute and his team did just that. But their science experiment was no fiction. They had a serious goal: to try to understand how parts of the brain play a role in obesity. (Obesity is the condition of being very overweight, which has been linked to a variety of health problems.) The scientists observed that the more junk food the rats ate, the more they wanted to eat—a behavior very similar to that of rats add...

There may be a strange, slithering invasion coming from the South. Big snakes like anacondas, boa constrictors and pythons now live in the wilds of southern Florida. Although not originally native to the United States, some of them are now being born there. Most were people’s pets (or the offspring of pets) that got too big, leading the owners to release them into the wild. So far, the snakes have stayed put. But there’s nothing stopping them from moving farther north. According to a new study by government scientists, some species of large snakes could live comfortably in a large part o...

Scientists are engineering microscopic viruses to help in the building of smaller, lighter power supplies for a variety of devices.