We are all familiar with NASA's long string of triumphs in spaceflight and the exploration of distant worlds and the cosmos. No less impressive is NASA's record of achievements in helping us understand our home planet.

The Evogrid is a proposed computerized version of the primordial soup. Digitally simulating virtual particles could help answer the question of how life originated on Earth, and perhaps even spread life to other worlds.

JPL engineers work to simulate Spirit's predicament on Mars.

A search for gravitational waves stemming from the creation of the universe commences this week with an array of new detectors sensitive enough to measure signals as faint as a billionth of a volt.

Dr. John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. joined the Blueshift podcast on June 18th to share his sense of what makes scientific data beautiful.

A team of scientists is developing hand-held devices that can detect the presence of aerosols in air above oceans by measuring how light scatters as it strikes the particles.

The summer of 1988 was apocalyptic in Yellowstone National Park. For hundreds of miles, a blood-red Sun shone through choking, brown skies as flames consumed vast tracts of forest.

Scientists have determined there's more than twice as much carbon stored in the Arctic regions as previously estimated and more than double the amount in the Earth's atmosphere.

Scientists have determined that nickel could be used to identify the presence of methane-producing microbes on the early Earth.

Yesterday, the test rover that is an exact twin of NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers was set up in a plywood test rig in a dirt pit at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.