TBILISI, Georgia, Aug. 19 -- Russian troops returned to the Georgian port city of Poti on Tuesday, taking 20 Georgian soldiers prisoner, towing away several American Humvees and blowing up a missile ship, reporters and Georgian officials said.

Sen. Barack Obama has detailed a comprehensive space plan that includes $2 billion in new funding to reinvigorate NASA and a promise to make space exploration and science a significantly higher priority if he is elected president.

". . . like a fish to water." It's a cliche that describes something effortless, but if you're running an aquarium, there is nothing effortless about filling your tanks with water that won't kill your horn sharks, loggerhead turtles and sea horses. The myriad fish, invertebrates and plants thrivi...

AMWELL, Pa. -- The guys on the derrick, filthy with mud and grease, have the best view in the county. Their drilling rig rises from a bulldozed, flattened patch of meadow near the top of a hill. To the south is an old farmhouse and a white barn. Hay bales dry in the sun.

NASA's ability to send its astronauts to the $100 billion international space station is in danger of becoming a costly casualty of the Russia-Georgia war.

The archaeological site at Gobero in the Eastern Sahara is not going to rewrite the history of Stone Age man, or even the history of settlement in North Africa, where desert and lake have played tag with each other for eons.

In the latest sign of trouble in the planet's chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crabs and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released...

Surgeons in Denver are publishing their first account of a procedure in which they remove the hearts of severely brain-damaged newborns less than two minutes after the babies are disconnected from life support, and their hearts stop beating, so the organs can be transplanted into infants who would...

When Julie Peterson decided to have a baby on her own two years ago, she picked a tall, blond, blue-eyed Danish engineer as a sperm donor to match her own Scandinavian heritage. But when she went back to the sperm bank to use the same donor to have another child, she was stunned to discover that the...

If American sprinters Tyson Gay and Walter Dix reprise their race in the U.S. Olympic trials at the Olympic finals in Beijing, you will see the athletes crouch low over the starting blocks. Gay's right foot will be in the rear position on the blocks; Dix prefers to have his left foot in the rear ...

One of the most infamous examples of what can happen when a nonnative species is introduced into a new environment involves the brown tree snake -- a voracious, semi-venomous species that in less than 50 years all but destroyed bird life on the northern Pacific island of Guam. Introduced...

Quote of the Week: The winner, despite intense competition, is senior International Olympic Committee official Arne Ljungqvist, who said the deadly air pollution in Beijing is "mist," not a "major risk" and blamed the media for hyping the non-problem.

Government officials asserted yesterday that a troubled bioweapons scientist acted alone to perpetrate a terrorism scheme that killed five people, a case that centered on a near-perfect match of anthrax spores in his custody and a record of his late-night laboratory work just before the toxic let...

The FBI today will begin to unveil how it exploited the rapidly advancing science of genetics to link a single bioweapons researcher to samples taken from the victims of the 2001 anthrax attacks and to powder from the letters that killed them.

With reports circulating on the Internet that the Phoenix lander had found a chemical in the Martian soil that made past or present life there highly unlikely, NASA officials quickly organized a teleconference yesterday to announce that although they had made an unexpected discovery, it had little...

A new species of African monkey, discovered just three years ago in Tanzania, is facing extinction, reports the Wildlife Conservation Society, which conducted the first census of the kipunji. The survey, published in the July issue of the journal Oryx, counted 1,117 of the large forest dwellers,...

Days before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Osama bin Laden left his compound in Kandahar in Afghanistan and headed into the mountains. His driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, traveled with him. As U.S. and Northern Alliance forces stood poised to capture Kandahar a few months later, bin Laden told Hamdan t...

After Janice Van Wagner's mother died of breast cancer two years ago, her sense of loss was overwhelming.

In the past seven years, the federal government has spent more than $57 billion to shore up the nation's bioterrorism defenses, stockpiling drugs, ringing more than 30 American cities in a network of detectors and boosting preparedness at hospitals.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is calling on "eggheads" to help the military unravel questions about the recruitment of terrorists, the resurgence of the Taliban and messages delivered in militant Muslim religious schools.