People who read literary fiction are better than readers of popular fiction or nonfiction at figuring out the emotions of others, according to a U.S. study out Thursday.

Researchers hypothesized that people who read works of literature would be better at sensing what is going on in the inner worlds of others, but they wanted to test the notion.

Researchers said Wednesday they had discovered four natural mosquito repellents to succeed DEET, a compound whose origins go back to World War II.

DEET -- the abbreviation for N,N-diethyl-meta-toluamide -- was introduced by the U.S. Army in 1946 after troops deployed in the Pacific theater fell sick from malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

Scientists have discovered ancient supervolcanoes on Mars similar to the caldera that sits under Yellowstone National Park.

Volcanoes previously have been spotted on Mars, which is known to have been volcanically active billions of years ago.

China for years has welcomed the world's trash, creating a roaring business in recycling and livelihoods for tens of thousands. Now authorities are clamping down on an industry that has helped the rich West dispose of its waste but also added to the degradation of China's environment.

The Chinese campaign is aimed at enforcing standards for waste imports after Beijing decided too many were unusable or even dangerous and would end up in its landfills. Under the crackdown dubbed Green Fence, China has rejected hundreds of containers of waste it said were contaminated or that improperly mixed different types of scrap.

The U.S. government shutdown puts international science collaboration in peril and could have far-reaching impacts on innovation and research, a top science group said Wednesday.

"If the government shutdown continues for a week or more, it is going to make the United States less desirable as an international research collaborator," said Joanne Carney, director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Office of Government Relations.

Australia's native koala could face a wipeout from increasing temperatures unless "urgent" action is taken to plant trees for shelter as well as eucalypts to eat, a study found Thursday.

Lead researcher Mathew Crowther from the University of Sydney said the three-year study tracked 40 koalas by satellite in north-western New South Wales to examine their nesting and feeding habits.

The operator of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said Tuesday workers had spilled four tonnes of radioactive water, likely contaminating the soil and possibly groundwater.

Workers were pumping rain water that was trapped in a concrete gutter into an empty 12-tonne tank that sat on open soil, said a spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO).

Researchers said on Tuesday they had created saliva glands and tear glands using stem cells from mice, marking a further advance in the quest to grow replacement bio-engineered organs.

The work shows potential for treatments for malfunctioning glands that cause "dry eye" or "dry mouth" syndromes, which affect tens of millions of people around the world, they said.

Arctic ice melt due to global warming is having an unexpected impact on West Greenland's caribou, causing fewer calves to be born and boosting their death rate, a study said Tuesday.

Accelerated ice melt has caused the plant growth season on Greenland to start ever earlier -- about 16 days sooner on average in 2011 than in 2002, scientists wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

You expect to find plastics in your lunch box, not on a moon of Saturn.

But that's exactly where NASA found an ingredient of plastic — the first time the chemical has been detected on another world.