The U.S. space agency said Wednesday it is preparing to launch next month a sophisticated orbiting telescope that will use high energy X-ray vision to hunt for black holes in the universe.

The project aims to study the "hottest, densest and most energetic phenomena in the universe, like for example black holes and the explosions of massive stars," said Fiona Harrison, principal investigator for the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR).

Astronomers around the world will be using advanced telescopes to watch Venus cross in front of the Sun on June 5 and 6 in the hopes of finding clues in the hunt for other planets where life may exist.

By studying the atmosphere of a well-known planet in this once-in-a-lifetime event, scientists say they will learn more about how to decipher the atmospheres of planets outside our solar system as they cross in front of their own stars.

Nestled nearly 5,000 feet beneath the earth in the gold boom town of Lead, S.D., is a laboratory that could help scientists answer some pretty heavy questions about life, its origins and the universe.

It's hard to spot from the surface. Looking around the rustic town, there are far more nods to its mining past than to its scientific future, but on Wednesday, when part of the closed Homestake Gold Mine officially becomes an underground campus, Lead's name will be known in scientific circles as the place where the elusive stuff called dark matter might finally be detected.

A convoy of self-driving cars has taken to a public motorway in Spain in normal traffic, a world first, according to Swedish car maker Volvo.

A professional driver took the lead of the convoy in a truck, and was followed by four self-driven Volvo vehicles: a second truck and three cars, Volvo said in a statement.

Two killer earthquakes that struck northeastern Italy in nine days have shed light on the brutal but complex seismic forces that grip the Italian peninsula, scientists say.

Brian Baptie, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey (BGS), said the worst earthquakes in Italy occurred in the south of the country, which lies close to where one of Earth's tectonic plates is sliding under another.

A deadly fungus that has wiped out large populations of bats in North America has spread to a new species, the endangered gray bat, U.S. wildlife officials said Tuesday.

White-nose syndrome (WNS) was found in several gray bats in the southeastern state of Tennessee, though there was no sign that the disease had yet killed any of the endangered creatures, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.

They've been away, but now they are — hopefully —buzzing back to their rightful place in the bucolic British countryside.

Around 50 short-haired bees were released into an English nature reserve Monday, some two decades after they were wiped out from most of rural Britain. Ecologists hope that with the support of farmers who have agreed to grow flowers and plants that help bees flourish they will zip across the country again.

Across the vast Pacific, the mighty bluefin tuna carried radioactive contamination that leaked from Japan's crippled nuclear plant to the shores of the United States 6,000 miles away — the first time a huge migrating fish has been shown to carry radioactivity such a distance.

"We were frankly kind of startled," said Nicholas Fisher, one of the researchers reporting the findings online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Richard Leakey predicts skepticism over evolution will soon be history.

Not that the avowed atheist has any doubts himself.

Even robots like to have fun. NASA's rover on Mars showed off its playful side by snapping a picture of its own shadow. It's the latest self-portrait since the rover, named Opportunity, landed on the red planet in 2004.

The photo was taken in March and NASA released it this week. The solar-powered, six-wheel rover was at an outcrop on the rim of a massive crater. The late afternoon sun set the crater aglow and Opportunity waited for just the right lighting to send a postcard back to Earth.