Corn and soybean farmers not only survived last year's epic drought — thanks to crop insurance, they made bigger profits than they would have in a normal year, a new analysis finds. And a big chunk of those profits were provided through taxpayer subsidies.

Linguists used to think the human brain had a specific region devoted to understanding language. But brain scans now indicate that regions controlling vision, movement, taste, smell and touch are all called into action when we think of a word, too.

Pachyderms' metabolism offers clues to dinosaur behavior

Fourteen-year-old "Jane" was likely eaten by starving colonists after she died

A breathtaking new video captures a crisp evening descending into a star-strewn night in Death Valley National Park last month. This new production from Sunchaser Pictures -- the team that brought you Death Valley DreamLapse -- features two desert enigmas: ...

A deep dive into the nature and complications of alt fuels like fracked natural gas, methane hydrate, and tar sands oil    

A new bill moving through Congress would give the authorities unprecedented access to citizens' information.    

A vast geologic formation in three northern Plains states contains twice as much oil and three times as much natural gas as the federal government previously estimated, according to a reassessment of the area released by the Interior Department Tuesday.

A material called boron nitride - originally touted as useful for next-generation electronics - turns out to be a high-performance pollutant "sponge".

A plastic smartphone screen cover patterned with tiny lenses could help mobile 3-D take off.Last week, a company in Singapore began shipping $35 plastic screen protectors for the iPhone 5. These are no ordinary screen protectors, though—each has half a million tiny lenses precisely patterned on its surface, which can turn an ordinary phone into a device capable of displaying 3-D images and video, no glasses required.

At conference starting Wednesday, huge trove of research papers point to enormous possibilities, but privacy issues remain.Cell phones generate tremendous amounts of human mobility and other data that can be particularly useful in the developing world to redesign transportation networks (see “African Bus Routes Redrawn Using Cell-Phone Data”) and provide a boon to epidemiology (see “Big Data from Cheap Phones”).

The golf-cart-sized space explorer put itself in standby mode after sensing a problem on April 22 after routine maintenance

NASA is paying $424 million more to get U.S. astronauts into space, and agency is blaming Congress for extra expense

NASA scientists say a massive storm on Saturn's North Pole looks just like a hurricane on earth, spinning counter-clockwise. Its eye is 20 times bigger than the ones we see on Earth.

SpaceX calls it the "Grasshopper" — it's a rocket that doesn't fall back to Earth haphazardly after launch. It carefully returns itself to the launchpad standing up, right where it started.