Slovenian adventurer Matevz Lenarcic landed on Thursday in Western France after having overflown the North Pole in an ultra-light plane equipped to measure air pollution.

"Only yesterday (Wednesday) I flew almost 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles), no other similar (ultra-light) plane could do this," Lenarcic told Agence France Presse shortly after landing in Saint-Nazaire's airport, western France.

A tiny Ecuadoran satellite that collided in space with the remains of a Soviet rocket survived the crash, but was damaged and is not transmitting, Quito's space agency said Thursday.

Ecuador's space agency EXA had warned on Wednesday that a space fender-bender was likely between its "Pegaso" (Pegasus) nanosatellite and the remains of an S14 rocket launched by the Soviet Union into space in 1985, in the midst of the Cold War.

Cockroaches will eat anything. Except sugar, that is.

Some of the common pests have evolved to learn how to detect and avoid a certain kind of glucose often used in bait traps, according to research published in the U.S. journal Science on Thursday.

Russia has ordered the urgent evacuation of the 16-strong crew of a drifting Arctic research station after the ice floe that hosts the floating laboratory began to disintegrate, officials said Thursday.

Natural Resources and Ecology Minister Sergei Donskoi set a three-day deadline to draft a plan to evacuate the North Pole-40 floating research station.

Neanderthals may have started weaning their young from seven months of age and transferred them to solid food by just over a year, a fossil tooth study said Wednesday.

This is within the range for modern humans and chimpanzees, a research team wrote in the journal Nature, but may have been later compared to Stone Age Homo sapiens.

Swiss researchers said Wednesday that they had taken a step closer to unlocking the mystery of ageing after discovering the impact of a longevity gene in mice and then managing to extend the life-span of worms by 60 percent thanks to a basic antibiotic treatment.

"They were not only living longer, but were also more fit," said Johan Auwerx ion a video released by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), a cutting-edge Swiss research institute.

The world needs to wake up to the risk of a spike in natural disasters linked to climate change and strive to find ways to cut the human and economic cost, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.

"We live in a time of huge natural disasters which are made worse by climate change," the U.N.'s deputy secretary-general, Jan Eliasson, told reporters at the start of a three-day conference on risk reduction in Geneva.

Early humans living in South Africa made cultural and industrial leaps in periods of wetter weather, said a study Tuesday that compared the archaeological record of Man's evolution with that of climate change.

Anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, first made their appearance in Africa during the Middle Stone Age which lasted from about 280,000 to 30,000 years ago.

The first-ever manned airplane that can fly by day or night on solar power alone was set to soar early Wednesday on the second leg of its journey across the United States.

The fuel-free plane was due to leave Phoenix, Arizona for Dallas, Texas, organizers said. The U.S. crossing is being billed as the plane's first cross-continent flight.

A shipment of 259 elephant tusks smuggled out of Africa has been seized in the United Arab Emirates, the International Wildlife Fund for Animal Welfare said Tuesday.

The tusks were discovered at a Dubai port in a container shipped from Mombasa, Kenya labelled as wooden furniture.