MSNBC: Tech & science

Three astronauts who recently spent months together aboard the International Space Station reunited on Earth on Thursday during a Google+ Hangout to talk about their experiences aboard the orbiting lab and the challenge of readapting to life with gravity."It's great to all be back together," said NASA astronaut Kevin Ford from the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Ford, who returned to Earth on Mar...    

WASHINGTON — Microsoft won a round in a complex patent war on Thursday when the International Trade Commission said the company's popular Xbox entertainment system did not violate a patent owned by Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility. If the ITC had found that Microsoft infringed, it could have barred the Xbox from being imported into the United States. The fight over the Xbox is related to a lar...    

A new advertising method from Twitter will watch for tweets from you about certain TV shows and allow those shows' advertisers to target you. Of course, you can always ignore their tweets the way you ignored their commercials.The new way to target ads was described in a post on the Twitter advertising blog Thursday. It works like this: Suppose a user were watching a sitcom and tweeted about it. An...    

By Mike WallSpace.comHuman exploration of deep space is looking more and more like a tag-team affair, with NASA jetting off to asteroids and Mars while the private sector sets up shop on the moon.While NASA has no plans to return humans to the lunar surface anytime soon, private industry is eyeing  Earth's nearest neighbor intently, said Robert Bigelow, the founder and president of Bigelow Aerospa...    

By Mike WallSpace.comHuman exploration of deep space is looking more and more like a tag-team affair, with NASA jetting off to asteroids and Mars while the private sector sets up shop on the moon.While NASA has no plans to return humans to the lunar surface anytime soon, private industry is eyeing  Earth's nearest neighbor intently, said Bigelow Aerospace founder and President Robert Bigelow."The ...    

By Stephanie PappasLiveScience The body of King Richard III was buried in great haste, a new study finds — perhaps because the medieval monarch's corpse had been out for three days in the summer sun.The new research is the first academic paper published on the discovery of Richard III, which was publicly announced in February 2013. A team of archaeologists from the University of Leicester found th...    

By Clara MoskowitzSpace.comAn interplanetary weather app, a spot-the-space-station tool, and a Mars greenhouse concept are among the winners of the 2013 International Space Apps Challenge. The contest solicited mobile apps and technologies that aid space exploration and enrich life here on Earth.On Wednesday, a panel of judges from NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and partners announced the ...    

Scientists have finally figured out exactly what strain of potato blight led to the deaths of more than a million people in Ireland during the Great Famine of the mid-19th century — and it's not the usual suspect.For decades, researchers assumed that a particular strain of Phytophthora infestans, known as US-1, made the leap from the Americas to mainland Europe, and then to Ireland in the 1840s. S...