Rebecca Boyle

After a slew of successful of space telescope repair missions and launches in recent months, NASA is taking it easy these days. To use the newest powerful telescope, scientists will take a ride in a convertible. Sort of. The space agency's new telescope is situated inside a 747 with a hole in its side.

The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or Sofia, has an open hatch so a telescope can watch the sky while the plane flies at 500 mph.

Two high-profile geothermal projects in the U.S. and Europe were both permanently halted late last week, after federal officials in both countries questioned their safety and propensity to cause earthquakes. Projects in Basel, Switzerland, and in northern California were both abandoned, raising questions about the danger of purposefully cracking open the Earth to extract its heat.

A powerful new telescope called VISTA — the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy — just started work at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in the Chilean desert.

In its first five years, the telescope will be used for six major sky surveys, including one of the entire southern sky. Other studies will examine smaller regions in greater detail.

The telescope can detect faint sources and cover wide areas of sky quickly. Each image captures a section of sky about 10 times the area of the full moon.

Apparently men and women are not that different after all. In fact, the sexes are so similar that women have to fight their entire lives just to remain women -- at least on the genetic level.

A new study finds that turning off just one gene, shared by all mammals, turns ovarian cells into testosterone-producing cells found only in the testes -- and this is in adults.

If the weather holds, NASA's newest space telescope will lift off Friday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, on a mission to map the cosmos.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, is unlikely to see the fanfare granted to the more famous orbiting observatories, especially Hubble, Spitzer and Chandra. But the small satellite is expressly designed to make each of them smarter.

Fans of the intrepid Mars rovers got some bittersweet news today.

The good news: Starting Monday, NASA will try to drive the Spirit rover out of a sandy spot where it has been mired since April.

The bad: It will not be easy, and in announcing their plans today, NASA scientists sounded like they were preparing to say goodbye.

When humans eventually travel to Mars and beyond, they'll have plenty to worry about along with the discomforts of eating freeze-dried food and drinking their own urine. A new report says they will probably be really sick, to boot -- from flare-ups of E. coli, chicken pox or staph infections.

A host of microscopic stowaways could make interplanetary voyagers sick, especially because human immune systems are compromised in space, and because bacteria seem to thrive in micro- or zero-gravity environments.

The harvest moon--which came a couple weeks late this year, on Oct. 4--has long allowed farmers to gather their crops late into the night, using moonlight as a beacon.

Someday, the moon might yield a harvest of its own, thanks to a natural supply of water. A NASA probe is set to crash into the moon this week in search of that potential bounty. Here's how you can watch it from here on Earth.

You say tomayto, I say tomahto.

You say Miracle-Gro, I say ... pee.

Apparently, human urine works remarkably well as a fertilizer for tomatoes, according to a new study out of Finland.

Plants fertilized with a mixture of stored human urine and wood ash produced 4.2 times more fruit than plants without the pee, the study found. The urine-fertilized tomatoes had more beta-carotene than unfertilized ones, and much more protein than traditionally fertilized plants.

When it comes to space, what goes up must be sturdy, safe and secure if it's to live very long. Satellites must survive the bone-rattling jostle and pressure of launch, and once they reach orbit, they've got to weather the vast temperature changes they experience with every sunrise and sunset. Their skins must be thick enough to survive pummeling by micro-debris, and they'd better have trusty gyroscopes to be able to change directions or keep their balance.