Two fingers and a tooth removed from Galileo Galilei's corpse in a Florentine basilica in the 18th century and given up for lost have been found again, a Florence museum said Friday.

Two Asian carp species that could devastate the Great Lakes ecosystem may be a few miles from Lake Michigan. To halt their migration, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built an underwater electric fence on a canal 20 miles south of the lake. But tests conducted by David Lodge at Notre Dame indicate that they have gotten close to the lake despite the barrier.

With NASA reporting a "significant amount" of water on the lunar surface, is it time to re-examine our priorities regarding living and working in space? Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute, talks about why and how people should venture beyond Earth.

Researchers are hoping to improve solar energy installations by coupling a solar panel to an efficient hydrolysis unit that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. Daniel Nocera of MIT says the approach could lead to personal solar power units that could get many houses off the grid.

The stars of The Big Bang Theory are two fictional Caltech physicists, but the physics problems they study are real. Bill Prady, the program's co-creator and executive producer, talks about including real-world science in the script, from dark matter to magnetic monopoles.

One of the great mysteries about North America is what killed off woolly mammoths and other exotic animals that roamed the land after the last ice age. Ideas have ranged from a comet impact and climate change to human hunters. A study published Friday in Science Magazine provides new clues about this — cleverly deduced from samples of a fungus that grew on the animal's dung.

Certain sounds played while people napped helped them remember information associated with those sounds once they woke up, say researchers at Northwestern University.

Conservationists worried about overfishing on the Pacific island of Kiribati persuaded fishermen to pick coconuts instead. The strategy backfired: Coconut oil production increased, but so did fishing. It turns out, fishermen who earned more money in coconut agriculture had more leisure time — which they spent fishing.

Ancient bristlecone pine trees found in certain parts of California and Nevada have been growing at an unprecedented rate in the last 50 years. According to a recent study, this growth has most likely been caused by warmer temperatures. Malcolm Hughes, one of the study's lead researchers and a professor of dendrochronology at the University of Arizona's Laboratory for Tree-Ring Research, offers his insight.

Two instruments from the Hubble Space Telescope, including the camera that corrected an early flaw in the telescope, are now on exhibit at the Smithsonian. The camera, about the size of a baby grand piano, is responsible for some of Hubble's most astounding photos.

X-ray scans of the arteries of Egyptian mummies show that hardening of the arteries wasn't uncommon among the upper classes in ancient times.

A panel of experts says mammograms are causing women being screened for breast cancer to have too many false alarms and unneeded biopsies. The panel is recommending that women wait until 50 to get mammograms and then only every two years. The American Cancer Society says it stands by its recommendations of regular mammograms beginning at age 40.

NPR wants to see science through your eyes. Whether it's video, photography, animation or a finger-puppet show, we're challenging you to bring sciency stuff to life. We give you a topic, and you show us what you've got. Deadline for entries is Dec. 17, 2009.

A group of executives from more than a dozen auto, transportation and energy companies launched a new coalition Monday to urge the federal government to make a major investment in electric transportation. Their goal is to bring 100 million electric cars to the road by 2030.

New guidelines from the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force say women would get almost as much benefit out of having mammograms every two years after they turn 50 as having a mammogram once a year starting at age 40. Dr. Jeffrey Tice, general internist and assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, says the benefits of early screening for women between 40 and 49 are small. He says early testing for these women often results in more false positives , more procedures and more anxiety.