A 164ft (50m) long space rock with the destructive power of an H-bomb will narrowly miss the Earth next year, scientists predict.

There is one vital ingredient to every snowshoeing trip. And that's snow. Pulling back the curtains of my hotel room window, I gazed out at the sheer slopes of Mount Etna. There wasn't a flake to be seen. Did Luca, my guide, have some bad news? "Don't worry," he said, while loading our snowshoes into the van.

Scientists say new views of the massive asteroid Vesta reveal it is more like a planet.

This amazing video shows a meteorite crashing towards earth in the city of Cusco, Peru.

Indonesia's mount Lokon spewed hot lava and volcanic ash 1,500 metres into the sky in the north of Sulawesi island yesterday, prompting panicked residents to flee the area.

Andre Villas-Boas was "determined to be the best" from the moment he embarked upon a career in coaching, according to the man who helped him gain his Uefa badges.

Social Studies: There are times when the highest virtue is to be a man of inaction

Once upon a time there was the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe. Now, you could say, we have another, more local, "big bang" – for the origin of life on Earth. According to scientists in Arizona, the crucial components necessary for life to start may not have been generated by our own planet in the first instance, but come from somewhere deep in outer space, carried by the barrage of meteorites that crashed into the earth four billion years ago. The key is the discovery that a meteorite was capable of providing nitrogen-containing ammonia.

The mystery of how the building blocks of biology came to be on Earth may finally have been solved

A volcano in southern Japan erupted today with its biggest explosion yet, shooting out a huge plume of gas, boulders and ash and breaking windows five miles away.

The idea of a single meteor strike causing a mass extinction has taken a long time to find acceptance. But now, says Ted Nield, we should realise that what kills also creates

After midnight on 13 December, look out for what promises to be the year's best meteor shower.

The British-born astronomer Brian Marsden, Emeritus Director of the Minor Planet Centre (MPC), once famously – but wrongly – warned of an asteroid collision with Earth. He also helped demote Pluto to "dwarf planet" status and accurately predicted the return of Comet Swift-Tuttle.

I don't mean to be harsh, but I think Wallace's future as a television presenter is limited, despite the fact that he appears to have his own television studio in the basement. It isn't just that he has a face for radio – with his chiclet teeth and his permanently astonished gaze – but there's also the question of his reaction times. He can appear spontaneous, it's true, but it takes a team of three people working for a fortnight to make him so, which is always going to make things tricky when it comes to topical content. Hardly surprising, then, that in Wallace and Gromit's World of Invention he's only supplying fairly minimal links to filmed reports – heavy on the bad puns and relatively light on the elaborate ingenuity which fans have come to associate with one of Aardman's leading stars. If you were hoping for 30 minutes of animation you will have been disappointed, because Wallace and Gromit are here only as a kind of novelty wrapping paper for the sort of technological curiosity that would have once filled out the lighter stretches of Tomorrow's World.