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Butterflies may be free to fly, but 10-year-old Garret DelBeni's Monarch butterfly didn't want to go far on Tuesday. It flew from the fifth grade student's hand to some nearby flowers for a snack. That butterfly, bearing a tag that will help identify it when it reaches its destination some 3,000 miles away in Mexico, was part of a project conducted by the students in Sharon Ernst's science classes at East Amwell Township School. The students get to study the life cycle and ecosystem of the butterfly hands-on. Ernst's classes see monarchs grow from caterpillars, watch them form chrysalises and emerge as butterflies.

NASA revealed on Wednesday a design for its next colossal rocket that is to serve as the backbone for exploration of the solar system for the coming decades.

"Last summer, physicists announced that they had identified a particle with characteristics of the elusive Higgs boson, the so-called "God particle." But, as often the case in science, they needed to do more research to be more certain. On Thursday, scientists announced that the particle, detected at the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle-smasher, looks even more like the Higgs boson. The news came at the Moriond Conference in La Thuile, Italy, from scientists at the Large Hadron Collider's ATLAS and Compact Muon Solenoid experiments. These two detectors are looking for unusual particles that slip into existence when subatomic particles crash into one another at high energies."

"Mo Yan -- a beloved Chinese author who has captivated his countrymen by intertwining fantasy and gritty everyday life -- won the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Mo the prestigious prize, saying the author's "hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.""

According to Dr. Autiero's team, neutrinos emanating from a particle accelerator at CERN, outside Geneva, had raced to a cavern underneath Gran Sasso in Italy - a distance of 454 miles - about 60 nanoseconds faster than it would take a light beam. That amounts to a speed greater than light by about 25 parts in a million.

Now, with a $27 million grant from the National Science Foundation, a new supercomputer is set to raise the bar again at the center, located at the University of Texas at Austin. Called Stampede, it's expected to come online in 2013. If it were running today, TACC officials say, it would be the world's fastest supercomputer.

Stem cell research has had many ups and downs, but a stream of setbacks had left researchers almost back at square one.

An Israeli scientist won this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering quasicrystals, a material in which atoms were packed together in a well-defined pattern that never repeats.