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There are no scientific reasons the world can't chart a path, albeit a difficult one, toward the world's first AIDS-free generation, a top federal health official said Sunday. "There is no excuse scientifically to say we cannot do it," said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaking to the media at AIDS 2012, an international AIDS conference, which began here Sunday. "What we need now is the political and organizational will to implement what science has given us."

A city-block size asteroid will fly by Earth this weekend, well beyond the orbit of the moon, and you can watch it zip safely by live in an online webcast.

The simulation, which runs on a cluster of 128 computers, models the complete life span of the cell at the molecular level, charting the interactions of 28 categories of molecules.

A fight over genetically engineered foods has been heating up in the nation's grocery aisles. Now it's headed for the ballot box. Voters will soon decide whether to make California the first state in the country to require labels on products such as sweet corn whose genes have been altered to make them resistant to pests.

The Obama administration unveiled plans Wednesday to create an elite corps of master teachers, a $1 billion effort to boost U.S. students' achievement in science, technology, engineering and math. The program to reward high-performing teachers with salary stipends is part of a long-term effort by President Barack Obama to encourage education in high-demand areas that hold the key to future economic growth - and to close the achievement gap between American students and their international peers.

Through a labyrinth of hallways deep inside a 1960s-era building that has housed research that dates back to the early years of U.S. space travel, a group of scientists in white coats is stirring, mixing, measuring, brushing and, most important, tasting the end result of their cooking.

Nabel said no vaccine being tested today "is likely to hit it out of the park," but many researchers do feel advances in broadly neutralizing antibodies are key to developing a highly successful HIV vaccine. "It's really a new day when we start to think about where we are with AIDS vaccines," Nabel said.

On Aug. 5, as nervous JPL engineers watch, the fate of the rover — capable of pulverizing rocks and ingesting soil — will rest on a landing sequence so far-fetched that some scientists were skeptical it could work.

Imagine that the visible universe and everything in it was once contained in a volume many times smaller than the size of a single atom. With a quantum theory of gravity, we may be able to trace the Big Bang expansion back to its very beginning, and understand precisely how our universe arose, presumably from nothing.

If the discovery of the Higgs boson particle pans out, could that lead to a new array of mind-bending technologies result? Theoretically, it's possible, says Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss; but practically, it's unlikely.