[Wednesday, November 1, 2006] Fifty years ago, on Oct. 31, 1956, a tiny U.S. plane made that science possible when it landed on the ice sheet at the southern end of the world, 9,300 feet above sea level.

[Wednesday, November 1, 2006] The dust that condensed to form the sun, the Earth and the stuff of human bodies has long been thought to have originated in violent explosions of giant stars. But these explosions--called supernovae--can't account for all the dust in the cosmos.

[Thursday, November 2, 2006] A recent photo from the Cassini spacecraft shows the mighty planet Saturn, and if you look very closely between its wing-like rings, a faint pinprick of light. That tiny dot is Earth bustling with life as we know it.

[Friday, November 3, 2006] Fulfilling the President's Vision for Space Exploration (VSE) will require overcoming many challenges. Among these are the hazards of space radiation to crews traveling to the Moon and Mars.

[Monday, November 6, 2006] Scientists using the Swift satellite have spotted a stellar flare on a nearby star so powerful that, had it been from our sun, it would have triggered a mass extinction on Earth. The flare is the most energetic magnetic stellar explosion ever detected.

[Monday, November 6, 2006] It seems that there may be previously hidden biospheres that exist on Earth alongside our more familiar neighbors. One such community has been found deeply buried underground, while the other lives in the sea alongside more familiar life forms.

[Monday, November 6, 2006] The United Nations annual summit on climate change this week in Nairobi, Kenya, seeks to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol strategy, which becomes obsolete in 2012, to restrict emissions of heat-trapping gases that drive climate change.

[Tuesday, November 7, 2006] Atmospheric scientists have reported a new and potentially important mechanism by which chemical emissions from ocean phytoplankton may influence the formation of clouds that reflect sunlight away from our planet.

[Tuesday, November 7, 2006] Researchers in computational biology and marine science have combined their diverse expertise and found that trace-metal usage by present-day organisms probably derives from major changes in ocean chemistry occurring over geological time scales.

[Thursday, November 9, 2006] Cold seeps are deep-sea environment where fluid is released through slow diffusion from the sea floor. These harsh conditions give rise to some of the most extreme and scientifically challenging environments for life to exist on the planet.

[Thursday, November 9, 2006] Even if climate records from Greenland and Antarctic ice cores look different, climate of Arctic and Antarctic are directly linked.

[Thursday, November 9, 2006] Over the last half century, researchers have found that mineral surfaces may have played critical roles organizing, or activating, molecules that would become essential ingredients to all life--such as amino acids and nucleic acids.

[Thursday, November 16, 2006] The Arecibo Observatory's powerful radar - a keen eye aimed into the sky - has made the most detailed observations ever of a binary near-Earth asteroid. This information provides clues about asteroid formation, properties and motion dynamics.

[Thursday, November 16, 2006] NAI investigators along with scientists from the Geological Survey of Finland and University of Waterloo, Canada, and Michigan State University recently completed a scientific drilling expedition into deep permafrost of the Canadian Arctic.

[Friday, November 17, 2006] Ever wanted to see what volcanic eruptions, dust storms and changing ice glaciers look like from space? The European Space Agency (ESA) has created a special layer of content that will appear in Google Earth.

[Friday, November 17, 2006] On 17 November, the joint ESA-NASA Ulysses mission will reach another important milestone on its epic out-of-ecliptic journey: the start of the third passage over the Sun's south pole.

[Friday, November 17, 2006] Three teams of scientists are now preparing to use Antarctic ice as the key to open the strongbox that has contained extraterrestrial neutrinos' mysteries since the early universe - even though no one is sure what they will reveal.

[Friday, November 17, 2006] A new article reveals how Dr. Miriam Andres' stromatolite investigation has begun to "fingerprint" ancient microbial pathways offering a new way to explore the origins of these living records, which are considered to be the core of most living organisms.

[Wednesday, November 22, 2006] This Dear Colleague letter provides information on anticipated FY-07 National Science Foundation (NSF) funding opportunities for IPY research and education activities that have been identified to date.

[Thursday, November 23, 2006] There has been an important change in the approval process for planetary feature names: as soon as the WGPSN has successfully reviewed a name, it is considered approved and can be used in publications.

[Friday, November 24, 2006] Below the swath of seemingly impenetrable ice that separates the station and the Royal Society Range, about 65 kilometers away, a riotous and colorful marine community thrives in McMurdo Sound.

[Saturday, November 25, 2006] OOSA is organizing the second Workshop on the International Heliophysical Year 2007 and Basic Space Science. The Workshop will be held at the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore, from 27 November to 1 December 2006.

[Saturday, November 25, 2006] The earth experienced its biggest mass extinction about 250 million years ago. New research shows that this mass extinction did more than eliminate species: it fundamentally changed the basic ecology of the world's oceans.

[Saturday, November 25, 2006] For the first time, scientists have directly measured the amount of heat flowing from the molten metal of Earth's core into a region at the base of the mantle.

[Monday, November 27, 2006] The German radar satellite TerraSAR-X will be launched from Baikonur on 27 February 2007 on a Dnepr-1 rocket.

[Tuesday, November 28, 2006] The majority of all animal species on Earth, went extinct approximately 65 million years ago. A new study provides compelling evidence that "one and only one impact" caused the mass extinction, according to a University of Missouri-Columbia researcher.

[Wednesday, November 29, 2006] Two and a half billion years ago, when our evolutionary ancestors were little more than a twinkle in a bacterium's plasma membrane, the process known as photosynthesis suddenly gained the ability to release molecular oxygen into Earth's atmosphere.

[Thursday, November 30, 2006] The geomagnetic field ranged from quiet to severe storm levels during the past 24 hours. An initially quiet field became disturbed after 0500Z due to an extended period of southward interplanetary magnetic field.