This is the typical day of a relatively typical soul in today's diversified world. I wake up to the sound of my Japanese clock radio, put on a T shirt sent me by an uncle in Nigeria and walk out into the street, past German cars, to my office. Around me are English-language students from Korea, Switzerland and Argentina -- all on this Spanish-named road in this Mediterranean-style town. On TV, I find, the news is in Mandarin; today's baseball ...

The bitterly fought Pluto wars of a few years back showed that even the experts disagree on what is and what isn't a planet. One thing there's no quarrel about, of course: a planet is, by definition, something that orbits a star. Except, it turns out, when it isn't. Writing in the latest issue of Nature, a team of astronomers is reporting the discovery of ten objects roughly the size of Jupiter that seem to be on the ...

Mars is a dry, frigid, dusty, nearly airless place. A couple of billion years ago, though, it wasn't much different from Earth. A string of space probes have proven that the Red Planet once sported rivers that carved huge canyons across the landscape — and even oceans, whose shorelines are still visible from orbit. Open water couldn't have existed without a relatively thick atmosphere, and most of that Martian atmosphere leaked out into space long ago. But some ...

I am neutral on most things that don't involve food or sex or sexfood, which does not yet exist but which I already feel strongly about. But I am against Net neutrality. That's the idea being pushed by the President, the FCC and people who write comments on blogs and want everything to be free except what they happen to do for a living. Net neutrality would set up rules to make sure your Internet provider treats all information equally; ...

It's taken six years and six gravity assists from three different planets to get there, but at a little after 9 P.M. Eastern time on Thursday night, NASA's Messenger spacecraft finally settled into orbit around the small, scorched planet Mercury. Other space probes have flown by Mercury in the past, hastily snapping pictures and taking measurements as they've gone — Mariner 10 was the first, back in the 1970s, and Messenger itself did several flybys itself in ...

The celebrities and the superrich who live in Isleworth, including Tiger Woods, would like to project a common touch. Every Halloween, residents of the gated golf community near Orlando, Fla., decorate their golf carts and drive trick-or-treaters door-to-door. They share lunches and dinners at the country club, play pickup basketball games and hold community events. "It's pretty normal," says Rav Mehta, CEO of a software-development firm who lives just outside Isleworth's vine-covered walls but has many friends inside. Normal ...

President Barack Obama's Nobel peace surprise was given "primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament," according to Agot Valle, a Norwegian politician who served on the award committee. Valle told the Wall Street Journal that the stewards of the prize wanted to "support" Obama's goal, as expressed recently at the United Nations, "of a world without nuclear weapons." It's tough to think of a goal more widely espoused than the dream of an H-bomb-free planet. Ronald ...

Scientists at NASA have discovered a nearly invisible ring around Saturn -- one so large that it would take 1 billion Earths to fill it. The ring's orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane. The bulk of it starts about 3.7 million miles (6 million km) away from the planet and extends outward another 7.4 million miles (12 million km). Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And its entire volume ...

Scientists have discovered the first confirmed Earthlike planet outside our solar system, they announced Wednesday. "This is the first confirmed rocky planet in another system," astronomer Artie Hatzes told CNN, contrasting the solid planet with gaseous ones like Jupiter and Saturn. But "Earthlike" is a relative term. The planet's composition may be similar to that of Earth, but its environment is more like a vision of hell, the project's lead astronomer said. It is so close to the star it ...

Ancient man may have started global warming through massive deforestation and burning that could have permanently altered the Earth's climate, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. The study, published in the scientific journal Quaternary Science Reviews and reported on the University of Virginia's Web site, says over thousands of years, farmers burned down so many forests on such a large scale that huge amounts of carbon dioxide were ...