Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberte has blasted into orbit on a Russian rocket to become the latest space tourist.

Wheelchair-bound British scientist Stephen Hawking is handing over his job at Cambridge university this week.

The chunks of ice and dust that make their home in the Oort cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, sometimes become dislodged and head into the solar system as streaky comets. Some disruptions, caused by passing stars and other interactions with the Milky Way galaxy, are severe enough to send Oort comets into orbits that buzz or even collide with Earth. New simulations have revealed a novel mechanism for their entry into our part of the solar system, a method that also suggests that comet showers may not have been strongly involved in major extinctions on Earth.Comet dynamics depend heavily on Jupiter and Saturn: their huge gravitational fields tend to keep objects away from Earth. Comets that manage to skirt Jupiter and Saturn, the conventional thinking goes, had to have originated in the outer reaches of the Oort cloud, where perturbations from outside the solar system can be felt most strongly and are writ large across vast cometary orbits that take hundreds of years to complete. Onl

Modeling study shows pebbles condense, rain from rocky exoplanet's atmosphere.

The full moon tonight will appear large and colorful in the east this week as evening falls.

Lose weight while you sleep? It sounds too good to be true--but recent research indicates that there is a connection between how much you weigh and the amount of shut-eye you get per night.Two hormones, ghrelin and leptin, help to control appetite. When you do not get enough rest, levels of ghrelin, which increases hunger, rise; levels of leptin, which promotes feelings of fullness, sink. A study in the May issue of Psychoneuroendocrinology found a significant disruption in nighttime ghrelin levels in chronic insomniacs. According to the study, this hormone imbalance leads insomniacs to experience an increase in appetite during the day, leading to weight gain over time. [More]

A Canadian space tourist and two career astronauts are en route to the International space station (ISS).

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is the most ambitious attempt yet to map the expansion history of the Universe using the technique known as baryon acoustic oscillation. Part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, BOSS achieved "first light" on the night of Sept. 14-15, when it acquired data with its upgraded spectrographic system across the entire focal plane of the Sloan Foundation telescope at Apache Point Observatory.

New images of Mercury from final MESSENGER probe flyby show close-up of bright spot.

(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) Warnings have been posted in the extreme northeastern Philippines as Parma has powered up into a super typhoon, and its new forecast track takes it over the northeastern tip of the Philippines, and three NASA satellites are keeping tabs on it.