For as long as there have been lights in the night sky, humans have been coming up with names for them.

Internet sensation Jamie Curry is teaming up with a top Kiwi journalist for an adventure to the coldest, driest, windiest continent on the planet.

Outgoing US President Barack Obama has revived calls to send humans to Mars by 2030s - but even if astronauts get there, would they remember much of it?

The major threat that the South Island's Alpine Fault poses to New Zealand has been front and centre of a Civil Defence conference in Queenstown this week.

Collating data on eruptions, earthquakes and gas emissions promise new predictive tools.

The potential environmental impacts of controversial off-shore mining will be investigated in a new multi-million dollar study.

Researchers mapped out the homicidal histories of over 1000 mammals - and found NZ's sea lion among the most murderous.

The East Coast Lab has been launched to research New Zealand’s least understood subduction zone, the Hikurangi Trough. Made with funding from NZ on Air

Scientists have discovered something strange deep in the jungle of Madagascar: the "ghost snake".

Manuka honey's potential to defeat a superbug may give it another advantage, but all may be fruitless if our bee population continues to decline.

It was the greatest extinction event the world had ever known, wiping out more than 90% of marine life and around two thirds of animals on land.

A US researcher has discovered how to control multiple robotic drones using the human brain.

Organisers of a nationwide survey are urging people to keep a sharp eye out for feathered visitors to their back gardens.

Supernatural thuds in one of the world's most baffling sinkholes, dubbed a "gateway to the underworld", has sounded alarm bells for experts.

Tagging sharks, walking on volcanoes - science is a lot more than being stuck in a lab. Jamie Morton finds out how some researchers spend their days.

Visitors to an upcoming Mars exhibit at Nasa's Kennedy Space Center will be able to explore several sites on the red planet, reconstructed using real imagery from Nasa's Curiosity Mars Rover.

The explosive history of Rangitoto has again been rewritten, after scientists recovered buried clues of ancient blasts deep below the Island.

British astronomers have discovered a cluster of nine "monster" stars 30 million times brighter than the Sun which could change our understanding of the way stars are formed.

Like a zombie, the Milky Way galaxy may already be dead but it still keeps going.

Some wrong ideas are innocuous, but others can do the world serious harm.

Freezing wind storms. Temperatures plunging to -40C. Months of perpetual daylight or darkness. These brutal, barely imaginable conditions seem positively Martian.

Exploration of the solar system over the past year has produced exciting finds, writes Alan Duffy.

Not every aspect of climate science is completely resolved, and here are five questions that are guaranteed to get the experts going.

Australia would support a UN review of restricting global warming to 1.5C, despite holding firm on a less ambitious goal.

Scientists have demonstrated how robots can learn much like tots do.

Scientists investigating the rising spread of drug-resistant bugs in our homes have thrown up a hairy potential culprit: our pet pooches and moggies.

Jamie talks to Paul Young of youth advocacy group Generation Zero about what climate change means for our young people.

New Zealand boosted its efforts in the field with the opening of AUT University's state-of-the-art neurocomputing lab - the NeuLab.

With the UN climate talks now underway in Paris, the Herald's science reporter Jamie Morton is talking to a range of experts on climate-related issues.

Jamie Morton talks to Professor Ralph Sims about how New Zealand might slash emissions in its energy and transport sectors.