Cheers and applause erupted at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday as a waist-high unmanned lander, called InSight, touched down on Mars, capping a nearly seven-year journey from design to launch to landing.

A scientist in China claims to have created the world's first genetically-edited babies, a move that would be a ground-breaking medical first but which has generated a barrage of criticism.

Kurt Eberly has hardly any hair and keeps losing more. His job is to launch, two times per year, a metallic cylinder packed with several tons of supplies, at high speeds toward the International Space Station, 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth.

A Russian Soyuz rocket with a cargo vessel blasted off Friday in the first launch to the International Space Station (ISS) since a manned accident last month.

Deadly radiation from the cosmos, potential vision loss, and atrophying bones are just some of the challenges scientists must overcome before any future astronaut can set foot on Mars, experts and top NASA officials said Tuesday.

A super-computer at the International Space Station aims to bring "cloud" computing to astronauts in space and speed up their ability to run data analysis in orbit, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise said Thursday.

The U.S. space agency's Kepler space telescope has run out of fuel and is being retired after nine years, having helped discover 2,600 planets, some of which may hold life, officials said Tuesday.

The unmanned space telescope, which launched in 2009, revealed that billions of hidden planets are in space and revolutionized humanity's understanding of the universe, experts said.

NASA chief Jim Bridenstine on Friday praised the Russian space program and said he expected a new crew to go to the International Space Station in December despite a rocket failure.

The two-man crew of a Soyuz rocket made a successful emergency landing Thursday after an engine problem on lift-off to the International Space Station, in a major setback for the beleaguered Russian space industry.

US astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin were rescued without injuries in Kazakhstan.

From family and friends to strangers on the subway and public figures on 24-hour news cycles, humans recognise an astonishing 5,000 faces, scientists said Wednesday in the first study of its kind.

Through most of history humans lived in small groups of a hundred or so individuals, a pattern that has changed drastically in recent centuries.