Science, Europe | featured news

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.

A newfound particle discovered at the world's largest atom smasher last year is indeed a Higgs boson, which is thought to play a role in how other subatomic particles get their mass, scientists reported Thursday at the annual Rencontres de Moriond conference in Italy.

Scientists have given another eloquent demonstration of how DNA could be used to archive digital data. The UK team encoded a scholarly paper, a photo, Shakespeare's sonnets and a portion of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech in artificially produced segments of the "life molecule".

Rita Levi-Montalcini, a biologist who conducted underground research in defiance of Fascist persecution and went on to win a Nobel Prize for helping unlock the mysteries of the cell, died in Rome at the age of 103.

Scientists have found three well preserved ancient insects frozen in amber - and time - in what is Earth's oldest bug trap. The discoveries of amber-encased insects in Italy may sound like something out of "Jurassic Park" but these bugs are even older than that. They are about 230 million years old, which puts them in the Triassic time period, and about 100 million years older than what had been the previously known oldest critters trapped in fossilized tree resin, or amber.

Member state delegations to the European Space Agency reiterated their desire to press ahead with missions to Mars in 2016 and 2018.

British scientists have found scores of fossils the great evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin and his peers collected but that had been lost for more than 150 years....

European scientists say they've figured out the recipe for water in space: Just add starlight.

A European space probe headed toward its next target Sunday after sending back detailed images of an asteroid that scientists hope will increase understanding of how the solar system evolved.

Ancient humans ventured into northern Europe far earlier than previously thought, settling on England's east coast more than 800,000 years ago, scientists said.