NASA has reversed a decision to ban six Chinese scientists from a space conference, Chinese state media said, after prominent U.S. astronomers vowed to boycott the meeting in a row over academic freedom.

The U.S. space agency had barred them from participating in the meeting on exoplanets -- bodies outside the solar system -- in California in early November, saying it was legally obliged to do so because of their nationality.

Heavy rain at the Fukushima nuclear plant caused a leak of radioactive water containing a cancer-causing isotope, possibly into the sea, its operator said Monday, as a typhoon approaching Japan threatened further downpours.

It is the latest in a long line of setbacks at the site and further undermines agreements between operator Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) and the government, which limit the level of radioactive contamination in water that goes outside the plant.

NASA says a big asteroid that whizzed by Earth last month unnoticed is probably nothing to worry about when it returns much closer in 19 years.

NASA Near-Earth Object program manager Donald Yeomans said there is a 1 in 48,000 chance that the 1,300-foot (400-meter) asteroid will hit Earth when it returns on Aug. 26, 2032.

A satellite monitoring Earth's gravity field since 2009 will run out of fuel "in the coming days" and eventually crash, with little risk to humans, the European Space Agency said Friday.

About 40 to 50 fragments with a combined mass of 250 kilograms (550 pounds) are projected to hit our planet within weeks of the GOCE satellite running out of fuel, according to spacecraft operations manager Christoph Steiger.

Policymakers from some 100 nations meet in France next week to bolster efforts to have 10 percent of the world's marine and coastal areas under protection by 2020, conference organizers said Friday.

Today's coverage is less than three percent.

The world's largest tropical forest actually contains a lot of the same kinds of trees, according to research on the Amazon published this week in the U.S. journal Science.

Researchers embarked on an ambitious endeavor to catalog the types of trees seen most often in the vast Amazon basin, which spans parts of Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

Descending by plane into the Maldives offers a panoramic view of azure seas and coral-fringed islands, but as the tarmac nears, billowing smoke in the middle distance reveals an environmental calamity.

Thilafushi Island, a half-hour boat trip from the capital, is surrounded by the same crystal clear waters and white sand that have made the Indian Ocean archipelago a honeymoon destination for the rich and famous.

Human yawns are contagious for chimpanzees but, like children, this only happens among apes that have grown beyond infancy, scientists said Thursday.

Playing with a researcher, orphaned young chimps aged between five and eight years began to yawn after their human chum did so, investigators at Sweden's Lund University found.

A stunningly well-preserved skull from 1.8 million years ago offers new evidence that early man was a single species with a vast array of different looks, researchers said Thursday.

With a tiny brain about a third the size of a modern human's, protruding brows and jutting jaws like an ape, the skull was found in the remains of a medieval hilltop city in Dmanisi, Georgia, said the study in the journal Science.

An incoming comet that skygazers had hoped would provide one of the greatest celestial shows of the century, could be a fizzle.

So say astronomers tracking the eagerly-awaited Comet ISON as it races to a searing encounter with the Sun.