A powerful car bomb exploded Thursday close to ruling party offices in Damascus, killing over 50 people and causing widespread destruction in the Syrian capital's deadliest attack for more than nine months.

The bombing, which rocked the city centre and sent thick smoke scudding across the skyline, was followed soon after by a mortar attack on a nearby military headquarters.

World stock markets tumbled Thursday after U.S. Federal Reserve minutes gave investors an unwelcome reminder that super-easy monetary policy has an expiration date.

Transcripts from the Fed's latest meeting, released Wednesday, showed some policymakers are worried that the bank's $85 billion in bond purchases each month, which are designed to boost the sluggish U.S. economic recovery, could eventually unsettle financial markets or cause the central bank to take losses.

Iraqi officials said Thursday that gunmen have attacked an army checkpoint north of Baghdad, killing four soldiers and wounding four others.

Police officials said gunmen in two cars sprayed the checkpoint with bullets in the town of in Duluiayah. The town is about 75 kilometers north of the Iraqi capital.

A small boat with four cases of California wine has left South Carolina and will submerge the wine in the ocean for three months to age it.

California-based Mira Winery is experimenting to see how the motion, temperature and light in the ocean may affect the aging of the wine.

Take a walk through a human brain? Fly over the surface of Mars? Computer scientists at the University of Illinois at Chicago are pushing science fiction closer to reality with a wraparound virtual world where a researcher wearing 3D glasses can do all that and more.

In the system, known as CAVE2, a screen encircles the viewer 320 degrees. A panorama of images springs from 72 stereoscopic liquid crystal display panels, conveying a dizzying sense of being able to touch what's not really there.

Astronomers searching for planets outside our solar system have discovered the tiniest one yet — one that's about the size of our moon.

But hunters for life in the universe will need to poke elsewhere. The new world orbits too close to its sun-like star and is too sizzling to support life. Its surface temperature is an estimated 700 degrees Fahrenheit (371 degrees Celsius). It also lacks an atmosphere and water on its rocky surface.

Printing out body parts? Cornell University researchers showed it is possible by creating a replacement ear using a 3-D printer and injections of living cells.

The work reported Wednesday is a first step toward one day growing customized new ears for children born with malformed ones, or people who lose one to accident or disease.

Marguerite Joseph can be forgiven for lying about her age on Facebook.

The 104-year-old Michigan woman's granddaughter says Joseph is unable to list her real age on the social media site.

Manchester United chief executive David Gill said Wednesday he is to step down in June after a decade at the helm of one of the world's most valuable sporting clubs.

His move will deprive long-time manager Alex Ferguson of one of his closest confidants at the football club that was taken over in 2005 by the Glazer family, who also own the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Robotic surgery is increasingly being used for women's hysterectomies, adding at least $2,000 to the cost without offering much benefit over less high-tech methods, a study found.

The technique was used in just 0.5 percent of operations studied in 2007, but that soared to almost 10 percent by early 2010. Columbia University researchers analyzed data on more than 260,000 women who had their wombs removed at 441 U.S. hospitals for reasons other than cancer. The database covered surgeries performed through the first few months of 2010.