Legend once had it that the huge, three-toed footprints scattered across the central highlands of Bolivia came from supernaturally strong monsters — capable of sinking their claws even into solid stone.

Then scientists came here in the 1960s and dispelled children's fears, determining that the strange footprints in fact belonged to gigantic, two-legged dinosaurs that stomped and splashed over 60 million years ago, in the ancient waterways of what is now Toro Toro, a village and popular national park in the Bolivian Andes.

Scientists have detected what they believe to be lightning on Mars by eavesdropping on the whirling wind recorded by NASA's Perseverance rover.

A telescope in Chile has captured a stunning new picture of a grand and graceful cosmic butterfly.

The National Science Foundation's NoirLab released the picture Wednesday.

NASA unveiled close-up pictures on Wednesday of the interstellar comet that's making a quick one-and-done tour of the solar system.

Discovered over the summer, the comet known as 3I/Atlas is only the third confirmed object to visit our corner of the cosmos from another star. It zipped harmlessly past Mars last month.

Three Chinese astronauts stranded at their nation's space station after their spacecraft was apparently hit by space debris departed for home Friday using the craft that had brought a replacement crew, China's space agency said.

Their capsule was expected to land in a remote part of northwest China's Inner Mongolia region later the same day.

Space weather forecasters issued an alert on Tuesday for incoming severe solar storms that could produce colorful northern lights and temporarily disrupt communications.

In the past few days, the sun has burped out several bursts of energy called coronal mass ejections that could reach Earth Tuesday night and early Wednesday. The potential severe geomagnetic storms could disrupt radio and GPS communications, according to forecasters with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Scientists have long debated whether dinosaurs were in decline before an asteroid smacked the Earth 66 million years ago, causing mass extinction.

Three scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine Monday for discoveries about how the immune system knows to attack germs and not our own bodies.

Deep in Earth's past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.

It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.

The year's second total lunar eclipse is coming up fast, and this time Asia will have the best seats in the cosmos.

Earth's shadow will obscure this weekend's full moon as the home planet lines up perfectly between the moon and the sun. Totality will last a lengthy one hour and 22 minutes. The entire show — starting with the first dusky bite of the moon — will span more than five hours.