Technology & Space

Jeweler Harry Winston donated the famous Hope Diamond—the largest-known deep blue diamond in the world—to the Smithsonian Institution in 1958. It arrived in a plain brown package by registered mail, insured for one million dollars. Surrounded by 16 white pear-shaped and cushion-cut diamonds and hanging from a chain with 45 diamonds, the rare gem attracts 6 million visitors a year to the Natural History Museum.

Glow-in-the-Dark Jewels

How the Hope Diamond's mysterious phosphorescence led to "fingerprinting" blue diamonds

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Pyramid Ages the Aztecs

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Personal Genome Project

These holidays, give the people who have everything the one thing they don't: a map of their own DNA

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Impromptu Ice Sculptures

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Behold, the Geminids

One of the year's best meteor showers comes in December. Here's how to view the action

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Driving Miss Lazy

The race is on for cars that drive themselves

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Underground Munchies: Chimps Dig 'Em

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Architectural Genetics

Sandra Day O’Connor

Ain't No Lie

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Seeking Friendlier Skies

Can radar networks eliminate airplane turbulence?

Cloning cell-line colonies using cloning rings

Dept. of Sarcasm: Cloning the Important Stuff

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Today's Great Science Quote

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Life Unplugged

Bundle up your power cords—wireless energy transfer is here

Since early 2004, the Mars rovers have gathered images of rocks and terrain where water, the presumed prerequisite of life, once flowed (an artist's rendition).

Life Beyond Earth

An ocean on Mars. An Earth-like planet light years away. The evidence is mounting, but are astronomers ready to say we're not alone?

British Scientists Declare Independence from Americans

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Geoff Marcy's Heart Will Go On

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Presto!

Can invisible technology make Harry Potter disappear?

Marine archaeologists rescued the shipwrecked H.L. Hunley (above, a computer rendering) in August 2000 more than 135 years after it sank during the Civil War.

Saving Our Shipwrecks

New technologies are aiding the search for one Civil War submarine, and the conservation of another

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DeLorean Tremens

Hold onto your flux capacitors, time machines have nearly arrived

Sometime after 1938, a forger, perhaps oblivious to the document's historic nature, tried to boost its value by painting Byzantine-style illuminations on a few of its pages.

Reading Between the Lines

Scientists with high-tech tools are deciphering lost writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes

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