Two NASA spacecraft now have new assignments after successfully completing their missions. The duo will make new observations of comets and characterize extrasolar planets. Stardust and Deep Impact will use their flight-proven hardware to perform new, previously unplanned, investigations.

For the first time, scientists have used satellite images to demonstrate a link between rapid city growth and rainfall patterns, as well as to assess compliance with an international treaty to protect wetlands. The results have been published in two studies co-authored by Karen Seto, assistant professor of geological and environmental sciences and a fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.

New discoveries have been made about another universe whose collapse appears to have given birth to the one we have today. The research introduces a new mathematical model that gives new details about the beginning of our universe, which now appears to have been a Big Bounce, according to a new theory of quantum gravity, and not a Big Bang, as described by Einstein's Theory of General Relativity.