TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories

'The City Dark' Review: How City Lights Snuff Out Stars

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

A documentary titled The City Dark shows how the nighttime sky is vanishing fast, erased by round-the-clock artificial lighting

Why Energy Efficiency Isn't All It's Cracked Up to Be

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

If you use more as you pay less, the planet keeps getting hotter

Works on the European Extremely Large Telescope Begin

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

At least three giant-telescope projects are now under way, and the biggest of them, the European Extremely Large Telescope, is finally breaking ground in Chile

New 'Super-Earth': A Potentially Habitable Planet?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

In an improbable spot, scientists say they've discovered a world like our own where water and biology might exist

Sharpest telescope ever

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

A new system provides all the clarity of stargazing from space and none of the challenges

U.S.-China Solar War: Tariffs on Imports Spark Debate

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Tariffs on Chinese imports is a feel-good solution that could do a lot of harm

Happy Birthday, Opportunity! Mars Rover Turns 8

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Since 2004, the interplanetary car has been trundling across the Martian surface

Climate Change: Why It's Time to Focus on Farming

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

The fact that the climate is already changing, and will continue to change, means we need to start adapting agriculture to a warmer world immediately

The 'Choking Game': 1 in 7 College Kids Has Tried It

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

The potentially lethal Choking Game, which involves cutting off the blood supply to the brain, appears to be popular with some college students who think it's not as dangerous as using illicit drugs

New Mexico Is Stretching, Slowly but Surely

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

The driving distance between Phoenix and Dallas is getting farther. It's a minuscule difference -- not even a millimeter a year -- but it's a tangible phenomenon, and you can blame on the middleman: New Mexico

The Milky Way's Babies: Why Can't We See More of Them?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Our galaxy ought to have a lot more company -- so where is it?

Gravitational Lensing: The Optical Illusion That Explains the Cosmos

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

You may never have heard of gravitational lensing, but it's redrawing the very map of space

NASA's Lunar Orbiter Finds the Moon's Wetter Regions

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

The darkest, least habitable spots on the lunar surface turn out to be the wettest too

Astronomers Are Hunting for Exomoons with Kepler's Help

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

If distant stars have their own worlds, why shouldn't distant worlds have their own moons?

Russia Accuses U.S. of Secret Mars Plot After Probe Bust

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

The failure of a Russian space probe leads to charges of sabotage

Brain Science, Moral Disgust: Why We Loathe John Edwards

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

As John Edwards petitions for yet another postponement of his campaign-finance trial, a look at why the human brain recoils at the former pretty boy of politics

The Year That Winter Forgot: Is It Climate Change?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

What unusually mild temperatures do -- and don't -- tell us about climate change

An Oily Case: Chevron's Never-Ending, Record-Breaking Lawsuit in Ecuador

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

How long has the legal battle between indigenous groups in the Ecuadorean Amazon and the oil giant Chevron been going on?

China's Going to the Moon -- and That's Good for Everyone

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Until the U.S. gets its Apollo-era mojo back, it could do worse than rooting for China to go the places the U.S. won't

Why Wild Animals and Hollywood Don't Mix

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Nonhuman actors have always been featured in movies; they shouldn't be

Dry-Roasted Planets: A Sunlike Star Tried to Eat Its Young

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

In the KOI 55 system, the Kepler probe finds evidence that two dry-roasted planets survived the fiery death throes of their parent sun

GRAIL Mission Spacecraft Arrive at Moon to Study It

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

These satellites probing deep beneath the moon's surface will analyze its interior structure in unprecedented detail

Scientists Find That Pigeons Are Capable of Simple Math

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

It's not just humans and other primates that can master simple math; the most ordinary of birds can too

Is Fear of Divorce Keeping People from Getting Married?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

A new study suggests that young cohabiting couples are refraining from marriage out of fear of divorce

Got Money? Then You Might Lack Compassion

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Are the rich really the unfeeling boors they're made out to be? Studies suggest that the richer people are, the less compassion they show

Two Earth-Size Planets Found Orbiting a Distant Star

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Using the powerful Kepler space telescope, a team of astronomers has found two rocky worlds similar in size to our own, orbiting a star known as Kepler-20, some 950 light-years away

Environmentalism: Can Conservationists Trump Developers?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

A pristine planet is never coming back, but that doesn't mean it can't become O.K.

The Science of Fish Democracy: Minority Influence

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Political parties are not so different from schooling fish -- and that can be a good thing

Newt Gingrich's Unusual Ideas About Space and Science

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Moon mining! Space mirrors! The GOP front runner is full of ideas

Physicists Seek Higgs Boson 'God Particle' to Explain Mass

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Physicists close in on an explanation for why the universe has any mass at all

Study: Indoor Tanning Linked With Early Onset of Skin Cancer

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Given that indoor tanning beds were officially classified as a human carcinogen in 2009 -- up there with cigarettes and asbestos -- it should be fairly obvious that frequent tanning-booth exposure would increase your risk of skin cancer

For U.S. Renewable Energy, 2012 Will Be a Bad Year

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Expiration of federal subsidies could cripple a growing industry

NASA's Mars Rover Finds Mineral Traces Left by Water

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

A new discovery in a Martian crater yields clues to the planet's watery past

U.N. Global-Warming Talks: Good for Diplomats, Indifferent for the Climate

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

There are deals and then there are deals. That's my takeaway from the U.N. climate negotiations in the South African city of Durban, which finally concluded early Sunday local time

Scientists Find a Pair of Supermassive Black Holes

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

The discovery of two new black holes, each about 330 million light-years away or so, was just announced in the journal Nature. The smaller of the two is nearly 30% bigger than anything we've ever seen before

New Earth Found?

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

The Kepler Space telescope finds a world that looks tantalizingly like our own

A Key Trick to Bed Bugs' Persistence: Inbreeding

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

If bed bugs seem to be everywhere, it's probably because they are

Five Truths About Our Energy Future

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

It's not easy to see what's around the energy bend, but here are hard -- if unexpected -- realities

Would You Kill One Person to Save Five? New Research on a Classic Debate

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

Imagine you are a train-yard operator who sees an out-of-control boxcar running down a track that five workers are busy repairing

NASA's Growing Space Fleet Explores the Solar System

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 05:10:00 EST

A swarm of American ships is venturing deep into the solar system, studying Mercury, the moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto up close