The discovery of three new super-Earths by scientists with NASA's Kepler mission is helping to reveal the bounty of extrasolar planets across the Milky Way.

Now another team is set to build a new orbiting planet hunter that, during a two-year mission, will search for other worlds closer to our sun's neighborhood.

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which NASA approved under its Explorer program earlier this month, will be the first orbiting observatory to hunt for planets all around the sky.

A few months before he died, Carl Sagan recorded a message of hope to would-be Mars explorers, telling them: "Whatever the reason you're on Mars is, I'm glad you're there. And I wish I was with you."

On Monday, 17 years after the pioneering astronomer set out his hopeful vision of the future in 1996, a company from the Netherlands is proposing to turn Sagan's dreams of reaching Mars into reality. The company, Mars One, plans to send four astronauts on a trip to the Red Planet to set up a human colony in 2023. But there are a couple of serious snags.

Watch out, SpaceX, there's a new commercial rocket in town. After a few delays due to weather and a technical glitch, the Antares launch vehicle lifted off on its maiden flight on 21 April. The launch sets the stage for a second company to begin resupply missions to the International Space Station.

Since the space shuttles retired in 2011, NASA has been contracting with private firms to deliver cargo – and soon hopefully astronauts – to the space station. California-based SpaceX became the first private firm to officially resupply the ISS last October. Its Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida carrying a Dragon capsule filled with cargo and science experiments.

Unless space debris is actively tackled, some satellite orbits will become extremely hazardous over the next 200 years, a new study suggests.

The research found that catastrophic collisions would likely occur every five to nine years at the altitudes used principally to observe the Earth.

And the scientists who did the work say their results are optimistic - the real outcome would probably be far worse.

To date, there have been just a handful of major collisions in the space age.

In space, even the most mundane activities take on an exotic twist. Eating, drinking, sleeping… going to the bathroom… all of the everyday things that we do on Earth rely in some way on the constant, ever-present force of gravity. Remove that force — or at least mitigate its immediate effects — and everything behaves differently. Even something as unremarkable as, say, wringing out a wet cloth.

When it comes to preserving history, a group of archaeologists and historians are hoping to boldly go where no archaeologist has gone before.

Researchers are increasingly urging humanity to protect off-Earth cultural resources. That may well mean preserving NASA's Apollo landing sites on the moon as national historic landmarks, regarding far-flung spacecraft as mobile artifacts and even working to preserve some pieces of space junk.

The Arab world has given birth to many thinkers and many inventions - among them the three-course meal, alcohol and coffee. The best coffee bean is still known as Arabica, but it's come a long way from the Muslim mystics who treasured it centuries ago, to the chains that line our high streets.

Think coffee, and you probably think of an Italian espresso, a French cafe au lait, or an American double grande latte with cinnamon.

In fact, coffee comes from the highland areas of the countries at the southern end of the Red Sea - Yemen and Ethiopia.

A Russian scientist believes a remote Siberian rock formation may be the first place that humanity began to follow the movements of the heavens.

Sunduki, known as the Siberian Stonehenge, is a series of eight sandstone outcrops on a remote flood plain on the bank of the Bely Iyus river in the republic of Khakassia.

Professor Vitaly Larichev, of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, claims that the 16,000-year-old site was not only a place of huge religious significance in the ancient world, but also its stargazing capital.

An excavation funded with redundancy money shows Stonehenge was a settlement 3,000 years before it was built.

The archaeological dig, a mile from the stones, has revealed that people have occupied the area since 7,500BC.

The findings, uncovered by volunteers on a shoestring budget, are 5,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Dr Josh Pollard, from Southampton University, said the team had "found the community who put the first monument up at Stonehenge".

Odds are you carry DNA from a Neandertal, Denisovan or some other archaic human. Just a few years ago such a statement would have been virtually unthinkable. For decades evidence from genetics seemed to support the theory that anatomically modern humans arose as a new species in a single locale in Africa and subsequently spread out from there, replacing archaic humans throughout the Old World without mating with them. But in recent years geneticists have determined that, contrary to that conventional view, anatomically modern Homo sapiens did in fact interbreed with archaic humans, and that their DNA persists in people today.

Recent developments within the TEDx conference (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) community of organizers are indicative of a rising tide of intolerance in the world of science. Historically, TED has provided an influential forum for cutting edge ideas that may not otherwise have had a fair hearing in the public arena. Recent events, however, should cause one to question the credibility of TED and are a reflection of the increasingly polarized debate between science and religion in American culture.