Cool Science

NASA’s Spirit rover is stuck in the Martian soil, but the agency’s full complement of robots in the neighborhood are working to free it. For the past two weeks, Spirit has been mired in loose terrain near an area known to NASA as Home Plate. If you’ve ever driven a remote-controlled car into a molehill, [...]

The next flu pandemic may be hibernating in an Arctic glacier or frozen Siberian lake, waiting for rising temperatures to set it free. Then birds can deliver it back to civilization. New research suggests an influenza virus could go into hiding in the ice when earlier generations of humans, birds or other hosts developed immunity [...]