SpaceX announces it will send a spacecraft to Mars by 2018

On Wednesday, Elon Musk’s private company SpaceX announced on Twitter that it plans to send a spacecraft to Mars as soon as 2018. The mission - which SpaceX is calling 'Red Dragon' - will involve sending a Dragon 2 spacecraft to Mars to retrieve samples collected by NASA’s Mars rover and then return them to Earth.

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Why Men With Older Brothers Are More Likely to be Gay

Homosexuality might be partly driven by a mother’s immune response to her male fetus—which increases with each son she has.

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Japanese Monks Recorded the Climate for 700 Years

Some of the oldest continuous historical records from around the world show us how dramatically the climate has changed.

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Hubble discovers moon orbiting the dwarf planet Makemake

Peering to the outskirts of our solar system, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a small, dark moon orbiting Makemake, the second brightest icy dwarf planet — after Pluto — in the Kuiper Belt. The moon — provisionally designated S/2015 (136472) 1 and nicknamed MK 2 — is more than 1,300 times fainter than Makemake.

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The Case Against Reality

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses. 

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Size of monster black hole formed by trio of colliding galaxies stuns scientists

Three colliding spiral galaxies 1.8 billion light years from Earth have produced a monster black hole weighing in at 3 billion times the mass of the Sun

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Huge subglacial lake discovered underneath Antarctica's ice

Antarctica might be an icy, barren, windswept landscape today, but millions of years ago it was home to thriving forests, dinosaurs, and a breathtaking landscape replete with rivers, lakes and massive canyons. Much of its past is still sitting there, buried underneath layers of ice, waiting to be discovered in the form of fossils and geology. It's even possible that ancient creatures still live under Antarctica's ice, hidden for millennia beneath the continent's cold glacial cap.

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