It was one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, and a lot of people wanted a piece of it. Now, some 40 years after moon dust brought back from the Apollo 11 mission went missing, it was recovered at a St. Louis auction house and returned to the Johnson Space Center in Houston this week. "It's a speck — the size of a fingertip," said David Kols of Regency-Superior auction house, where the dust had ...

Even the most iconic moments in American history can start to seem a little shopworn after a while. The flag-raising at Iwo Jima? Seen the picture a million times. FDR's "nothing to fear but fear itself" speech? Isn't that a bumper sticker? The same overfamiliarity is true, to a lesser extent, of President Kennedy's historic speech before a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961 in which he set the U.S. on the path to a lunar ...

Deep in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, by the light of a full moon, I am passed a glass of sugary tea — and the discussion of another civil war in the heart of Africa begins. My two hosts in the town of Dilling are commanders in a government-sponsored Arab paramilitary force that a decade ago carried out Darfur-style atrocities against their African neighbors in the surrounding mountains. For nine years, they have held a ceasefire. But ...

In a valley high in the Wakhan Mountains of Afghanistan, a hunter several weeks ago waded through snowdrifts to check his traps and found that he had snared one of the rarest creatures alive: a snow leopard. If a naturalist had seen the leopard, he or she would have focused on its snowy fur with black, half-moon markings and its white goatee. A naturalist would have known that it is a solitary, elusive creature, a night hunter that ...

Hearing his favorite classics mangled by a dance band, many a music lover has longed to take out after the guilty man, but most lovers of the classics do not know where to look. A 32-year-old Tin Pan Alleyite named Ted Mossman is their man.By setting classics to 4-4 jazz time and adding banal lyrics, Mossman has made more money rewriting masterpieces than the original composers did in writing them. His most successful swipe was Chopin's Polonaise in A Flat, which he turned into Till the ...

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is calling for additional security for U.N. staff in Afghanistan, citing a "dramatically escalated threat" due to the world body's support for that nation's electoral process.Ban also said the U.N. is "exploring the feasibility of bringing in additional security units to guard U.N. facilities." The U.N. currently has hundreds of staff in Afghanistan offering technical and operational support for Afghanistan's elections. Various other U.N. agencies are involved in humanitarian work in the war-torn nation.

It was 1969 and a busy year for making history: Woodstock, the Miracle Mets, men on the moon -- and something less celebrated but arguably more significant, the birth of the Internet.

NASA is set to launch the world's largest rocket Tuesday, conducting research to help return astronauts to the moon.

NASA crashed a rocket and a satellite into the moon's surface on Friday morning, a $79 million mission that could determine if there is water on the moon. NASA televised live images of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, as it crashed into a crater near the moon's south pole. NASA officials said it appeared to be a "successful impact." Minutes before its impact, the satellite guided a rocket into the Cabeus crater in an effort to ...

There is more water on the moon in more locations than originally thought, a discovery that may bolster NASA's long-held goal of setting up an outpost there, a researcher said Thursday. One ton of the moon's surface -- in which the water's ingredients are held -- could yield as much as 32 ounces, or one quart, of water, according to three reports from research teams who studied data from three spacecrafts. Although that amount isn't large, said geological sciences professor ...