Charles Q. Choi

What might Earth be like crowned with rings? Space and science- fiction illustrator Ron Miller created extraordinary images of how the sky might look if Earth possessed such rings.

Will the majestic redwoods of California's coast survive the lightning-sparked fires raging across the state?

Astronomers might detect black holes falling into wormholes via ripples in space-time called gravitational waves, a new study finds.

Scientists have generated an exotic form of matter in the unique microgravity environment aboard the International Space Station and are using it to explore the quantum world, a new study finds.

An exoplanet may be shaped like an American football due to the mighty gravitational forces it experiences close to its star, a new study finds.

The way the fabric of space and time swirls in a cosmic whirlpool around a dead star has confirmed yet another prediction from Einstein's theory of general relativity, a new study finds.

Researchers have discovered humanity's oldest cave art. The paintings depict a hunting scene with what may be part-animal, part-human figures.

This weird locomotion has never been seen until now.

But collectively, genes do play a role in sexual orientation.

Previous research had suggested that high-altitude regions such as Tibet and the Andes were among the last places peopled by humans.

Hieroglyphic inscription may overturn view of the Maya.

Astronomers have shown that Einstein's ideas about the warping of space and time holds true as the best description yet of how gravity works.

From the 800s to the 1400s, about a dozen megadroughts struck the American Southwest, and all lasted longer than a decade.

Dead cells in the body don't sound very useful, but they might provide a new way to fight cancer, a new study in animals suggests.

Just a slight dip in the fertility rates of Neanderthals could explain their extinction over the course of several thousand years.

As if preparing for battle, some shrimplike creatures suit up in aluminum armor to survive the ravages of the deepest part of the oceans, a new study finds.

Mysterious "ghost apes" may have interbred with the great apes known as bonobos just as modern humans repeatedly had sex with now-extinct human lineages.

The 3-foot-wide rock rock visited us three years before 'Oumuamua.

An entirely new lineage of the mysterious human relatives called Denisovans has been discovered.

The event horizon is the threshold around the black hole where the escape velocity surpasses the speed of light. Here's what that means.

The probe's death death dive helped shed light on the mystery.

From a societal standpoint, you need a divine power watching you only if your neighbor isn't doing so.

A distant alien world that was potentially on its way into exile in interstellar space was rescued by the gravitational pull of a passing pair of stars, a new study argues.

Analyzing ripples in the fabric of space and time created by pairs of dead stars may soon solve a cosmic mystery surrounding how quickly the universe is expanding — if scientists are lucky.

The shape of your brain may say a lot about the Neanderthal in you.