In less than 72 hours, NASA's Stardust probe will approach Wild 2, a comet some 424 million miles (389 million kilometers) from Earth. Using a tennis-racquet-shaped collector filled with gaseous jelly, the probe will attempt to collect dust particles from the comet before returning to Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope is now living on borrowed time. Original plans for the observatory called for it to be retrieved at the end of its life and placed in a museum. But NASA now plans a more unceremonious demise for the telescope: crashing it into the ocean.

Scientists are clinging to hope that Europe's first probe to land on Mars will speak up and be heard, though no signal from Beagle 2 has been received since it touched down on the red planet Christmas Day.

How do you make something as miniscule and abstract as nanoscience, which operates on a scale of atoms and molecules, appear real to the ordinary eye? A new art exhibit in Los Angeles attempts a solution while exploring the cultural ramifications of the new technology.

Beagle 2 is on its way to Mars. The British-built spacecraft separated successfully from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter earlier today, beginning its descent for a landing on the red planet's surface due to take place on Christmas Day.

Over the past decade, dino-hunter Paul Sereno has led five extended expeditions to the Sahara Desert, one of paleontology's least understood and explored regions. With the help of a corps of researchers, he's amassed a stunning menagerie of new dinosaur species and other ancient animals.

Astronomers running computer simulations of planet formation have found that Earthlike planets with enough water to support life could be fairly common.

Geneticist Spencer Wells has traveled the world, collecting blood samples from people of far-flung cultures: Aborigines in Australia, the Chukchi of Siberia, Afghan farmers, and desert nomads in Africa. By studying the DNA of modern humans, Wells hopes to learn who we are, where we traveled to populate the world, and how closely we are all related.

Deftly carved figurines, including one that is half man, half lion, suggest that people living in what is now Germany were culturally modern 30,000 years ago. The newly discovered artifacts fuel the debate on when humans crossed the threshold into cultural modernity.

One hundred years ago today, a machine carrying a person made a brief and wobbly flight. As Wilbur Wright watched his brother Orville guide their flying machine into the air, the past and the future separated and the world started shrinking.

A giant crocodile in South Africa is revealing its secret whereabouts through instant messages to the cell phone of the scientist studying its habits. The new use of widespread communications technology allows researchers to dial up the whereabouts of the reptile whenever necessary.

A Chinese and American team of researchers supported by the National Geographic Society, have described the 125-million-year-old remains of the world's oldest marsupial. The fossilized ancestor to kangaroos, koalas, and other Australian mammals, was unearthed in northeastern China by entrepreneurial peasants.

Sharks and mysteries of the universe captured the imaginations of National Geographic News readers in 2003. The ocean's most feared predator, Bigfoot, and other unusual subjects accounted for half of the top ten news stories of the year and vied for the number one slot. Read the full list of the ten most popular reader stories of 2003. Full story and photo gallery:

Spacecraft from three different space missions are drawing closer to Mars. Over the next six weeks, landers and rovers are scheduled to touch down on the red planet's surface. Together with orbiting spacecraft, the probes will poke, scratch, sniff, and image the Martian environment, searching for signs of life.

A beautiful reptile once thought functionally extinct in the wild is back from the brink—barely. Can remote Cambodian mountains continue to shelter the Siamese crocodile?