Science News

Australian and Chinese officials urged two bamboo-munching giant pandas on Sunday to consider reproducing during their 10-year residency Down Under.

Tens of thousands of protesters have marched through the chilly Danish capital and nearly 1,000 were detained in a mass rally to demand an ambitious global climate pact, just as talks hit a snag over rich nations' demands on China and other emerging economies.

As negotiators grapple in Copenhagen over how to curtail carbon emissions, Europe's own system turns out to be an ATM for organized crime. According to officials, criminals have gamed the EU's Emissions Trading System for a cool $7.4 billion in purloined tax revenues over the last 18 months.

Engineers trying to save one of the world's most beloved robots turn for help to a high-tech version of a kiddie plaything: the sandbox. The famed Mars rover Spirit has been stuck since spring in a patch of slippery Martian soil. To help plot the rover's escape, scientists concoct some faux-Martian sand, and are running tests with a duplicate robot in the sandbox.

Cameras aboard NASA's Cassini spacecraft capture striking new images of a mysterious hexagon-shaped cloud formation on Saturn. The hexagon is probably formed by the path of a jet stream flowing around the planet's north pole. It was first discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in the early 1980s.

Charles Duhigg of The New York Times today delivered the latest unsettling news about the nation's water supply: It's not as clean as you might think. An analysis of federal data from the last five years revealed that more than 20 percent of the nation's water-treatment systems have broken the Safe Drinking Water Act.