Joe Palca

A powerful telescope is taking shape in the Chilean Andes. When finished, it will repeatedly image huge swaths of the sky, searching for rare events such as merging stars and other events.

There's a telescope high up in the mountains of Chile that's looking for signals from the earliest moments of the universe. Finding these signals would be key to explaining how the universe began.

Landing a man on the moon captures the public's imagination. But in the decades after the Apollo program, robots have also generated public excitement about space exploration.

A lot of important astronomy is being done thanks to telescopes stationed in the mountains of Chile, where researchers are studying developments in space.

The path of a total solar eclipse passed over the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile on Tuesday. You had to be in the southern hemisphere to see the eclipse.

On Tuesday, parts of South American will experience a total solar eclipse. The path of totality passes over one the world's premier observatories located in Chile.

There are human cancer genes in plants. Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee are studying what they and other human genes are doing there.

The eclipse will happen on July 2. Its path of totality cuts across much of the south Pacific Ocean as well as Argentina and Chile — including a telescope that is one the world's largest.

An instrument on NASA's Mars InSight mission that was supposed to be driven into the planet's soil is stuck. It's designed to measure Mars's internal temperature.

Cottonwood trees can harbor microorganisms that have a special (and flammable) characteristic.

Somehow, at the beginning of time, there was an imbalance of matter and antimatter. That's how all the stuff in the universe came about. Scientists think they may find an answer by studying neutrons.

NASA wants you to go to Mars...at least, they want your name to go. As part of a publicity campaign, the public can fill out a form and have a name coded on a microchip to head up in 2020.

Small drones have a problem — their battery life runs out relatively quickly. A team of roboticists says it has created special landing gear that can help conserve precious battery life.

A NASA probe called InSight is on Mars listening for marsquakes and it seems it has detected the first sounds of a quake, probably.

A biologist at Harvard was chatting with a colleague about a mentor who pushed him to do harder math problems. It turns out the colleague had the same mentor — and so did many others.

For more than a decade, Cathy Granholm has been tracking the Laysan albatross. They come down to Hawaii every winter from Alaska to nest and raise their chicks.

A team led by an undergraduate student at the University of Texas, Austin has found two new planets by using artificial intelligence to sift through data from NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope.

Getting DNA into plant cells is tricky. Researchers have tried using infectious bacteria, as well as gene guns that shoot gold bullets. Then a physicist came up with a new approach almost by accident.

NASA's six-wheeled rover landed on the red planet in January 2004 for what was billed as a 90-day mission. The plucky robot was still going until a dust storm on Mars last summer killed it.

A lot of vaccines and some medications need to be delivered by injection. Two groups of researchers are designing ways of delivering these medications by putting them in pill form.