Think about the last meal you ate. Whether it was a plate of pasta, a fresh salad, or a juicy steak, every bite relied on one essential element most people have never even heard of. Phosphorus keeps ...

Astronomers raised hopes that humanity might not be alone in the universe by announcing on Thursday they have detected the most promising hints yet of life on a distant planet. But given the age and ...

Our search for extraterrestrial life has turned up empty, perhaps because technologically advanced civilizations are doomed to fail. An astrophysicist has proposed an intriguing explanation for why ...

It was a simple question asked over lunch in 1950. Enrico Fermi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who helped usher in the atomic age, was dining with colleagues at Los Alamos, New Mexico, when the ...