Geoff Brumfiel

It's been one month since Malaysian Air flight 370 vanished with 239 people aboard. Even after combing thousands of miles of ocean for wreckage, the jetliner's disappearance remains largely a mystery.

Australia and China both claim to hear underwater pings from the missing Malaysian jet's black boxes. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel explains the pings, why they're tough to verify and what might happen next.

One researcher who participated in the latest U.N. report on climate change says the final product is simply too depressing. Others say the somber tone is justified — but that humans can also adapt.

A United Nations panel has released a report from scientists who are getting a much better understanding of the effects of climate change.

Searchers are feeling overwhelmed by the task of locating the wreckage of missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.

"We're not searching for a needle in a haystack — we're still trying to define where the haystack is," Australian Air Marshal Mark Binskin said Tuesday. The current search zone stretches across ...

Investigators will be using every tool available to hunt for the missing Malaysian Air flight. Probabilistic analysis played a big hand in finding the missing Air France flight several years ago.

The Malaysian prime minister announced that the missing airliner was likely lost in the Indian Ocean. NPR's Geoff Brumfiel discusses how this was determined and where the search will go from here.

As U.S.-Russian relations sour, some observers fear the plan to eliminate Syria's chemical arsenal might stall.

This past week, the removal of chemicals from Syria reached the halfway mark. Without pressure from both superpowers, however, some believe Syrian President Bashar al-Assad will begin to drag his feet.

"I think what ...

Einstein's theory of relativity explains the universe. But — in part because of a math error — some recently uncovered work by the great physicist is wrong. Really, really wrong.

Physicists say they've discovered a faint signal from just moments after the universe began. If confirmed, it could revolutionize our understanding of the cosmos. But not everyone is convinced.

Physicists using data from an Antarctica telescope say they've observed evidence of primordial gravity waves — in other words, echoes of the Big Bang. If real, this may be a big advance for physics.

The missing Malaysia Airlines flight was in contact with a satellite for hours after it vanished. Amid all the technology designed to keep it from doing so, how does a plane just disappear?

The Air Force has acknowledged a problem with cheating on tests by nuclear missile officers. NPR spoke with eight former officers, and seven said they had participated in some kind of cheating.

NASA needs Russian rockets to reach the International Space Station, and Russia needs NASA's money to help finance operations.

U.S. astronaut Mike Hopkins is expected to land in Kazakhstan, and despite diplomatic tensions the Russians plan to pick him up. It's another sign that U.S. and Russia remain tied at the hip in space.

Workers are about to re-enter a New Mexico waste dump that was hit by a recent accident. The incident is shaping up to be yet another setback in the quest to find a home for America's nuclear waste.

An accident at the site appears to be more serious than first disclosed. Nobody knows what happened, but it's shaping up to be a major setback for the nation's only dedicated nuclear waste dump.

International monitors announced Thursday that Syria has completely destroyed its equipment for making and filling chemical weapons. But the destruction of the chemicals themselves — more than 1,000 tons of toxic ingredients — is going to be a far more daunting task.

The problem is that it's just not ...

At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists use a powerful computer known as Titan to simulate everything from the inner workings of a nuclear reactor to the complicated effects of climate change on human populations — on a global scale. Until recently, Titan was the most powerful supercomputer on ...