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Vesicular stomatitis virus, or VSV, has long been a model system for studying and understanding the life cycle of negative-strand RNA viruses, which include viruses that cause influenza, measles and rabies.

Space shuttle Endeavour lit up the predawn sky above Florida's Space Coast on Monday with a 4:14 a.m. EST launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The shuttle's last scheduled night launch began a 13-day flight to the International Space Station and the final year of shuttle operations.

Deciphering microscopic clues hidden within fossils, scientists have uncovered the vibrant colors that adorned a feathered dinosaur extinct for 150 million years, a Yale University-led research team reports online Feb. 4 in the journal Science.

To map our home planet, Google Earth depends mostly on satellite imagery for land surfaces and sonar imagery for the sea floor. Maps of the Universe likewise depend on different kinds of detectors for different kinds of features. Maps of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), for example, depend on measuring minute differences in the temperature of the sky.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids. Astronomers have long thought the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never been seen before.

Olympic skeleton athletes will hit the ice next month in Vancouver, where one-hundredths of a second can dictate the difference between victory and defeat.

Astronomers meeting in Washington last week announced that a recent search for bright exploding stars -- commonly called supernovas -- found something quite unusual: antimatter.

Power-generating rubber films developed by Princeton University engineers could harness natural body movements such as breathing and walking to power pacemakers, mobile phones and other electronic devices.