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NASA is blaming Congress for the need to pay $424 million more to Russia to get U.S. astronauts into space.

Virgin Galactic is one flight closer to becoming a commercial "spaceline." The company's passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, completed its first rocket-powered flight Monday morning above the Mojave Desert in California.

The planned ruling would eliminate protection for the top predators, but scientists and conservationists say the proposal is flawed. Federal authorities intend to remove endangered species protections for all gray wolves in the Lower 48 states, carving out an a exception for a small pocket of about 75 Mexican wolves in the wild in Arizona and New Mexico, according to a draft document obtained by The Times.

One of the scientists who developed the theory of the Higgs boson says the particle should be renamed to acknowledge the contributions of others involved in the work.

A Dutch company is now accepting applications for brave men and women who would like to go to Mars.

Major academic medical centers in New York and around the country are spending and recruiting heavily in what has become an arms race within the war on cancer. The investments are based on the belief that the medical establishment is moving toward the routine sequencing of every patient’s genome in the quest for “precision medicine,” a course for prevention and treatment based on the special, even unique characteristics of the patient’s genes.

Young video game designers will be included in the 3rd White House Science Fair to be held on Monday, April 22nd. This is the second time that winners of the STEM Video Game Challenge have been invited to the Science Fair. Now in its third year, the National STEM Video Game Challenge is a competition among middle school and high school kids who design their own video games.

Europe's Herschel space telescope has imaged one of the most popular subjects in the sky - the Horsehead Nebula - and its environs. The distinctively shaped molecular gas cloud is sited some 1,300 light-years from Earth in the Constellation Orion.

Superstorm Sandy didn't just rattle the East Coast, it also jiggled the ground across the country ever so slightly, scientists reported Thursday. Earthquake sensors located as far away as the Pacific Northwest detected the storm's energy as it surged toward the New York metropolitan region last year. The network typically records the sudden release of energy in the Earth's crust, but it can pick up shaking triggered by ocean waves, mine cave-ins and tornadoes.

Just as light does, ants traveling through different materials follow the fastest path, not the shortest one. A recent study found that when fire ants (Wasmannia auropunctata) crossed different surfaces, the insects chose the route that would minimize their total walking time, rather than the distance traveled.