A closely tracked asteroid, about 150-feet (45-meters) wide, whizzed safely past Earth on Friday, the same day a much smaller, previously undetected meteor hit Russia, injuring nearly 1,000 people.

Live images from a telescope at the Gingin Observatory in western Australia showed the asteroid looking like a white streak, moving across against a backdrop of black sky.

A plunging meteor exploded with a blinding flash above central Russia on Friday, setting off a shockwave that shattered windows and hurt around 950 people in an event unprecedented in modern times.

The extraordinary event brought morning traffic to a sudden halt in the Urals city of Chelyabinsk as shocked drivers stopped to watch the falling meteor partially burning up in the lower atmosphere and light up the sky.

Even before they can talk, infants as young as seven months who grow up in bilingual homes acquire a special ability to distinguish between languages, researchers said on Thursday.

Scientists are still baffled by the mechanics of language learning, and how bilingual infants master their mother tongues as efficiently as monolinguals do.

The research center largely responsible for launching the "green revolution" of the 1960s that dramatically raised crop yields is getting support from the world's richest men to develop genetically-modified seeds to help farmers in the developing world grow more grain in the face of a changing climatic conditions and increased demand.

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Mexican telecom magnate Carlos Slim donated a total of $25 million to build a new cluster of biotechnology labs at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico.

Researchers looking for a nocturnal bird in Indonesia accidentally identified a new species of owl — one that has a distinct whistling song and is believed to exist nowhere else in the world.

The Rinjani Scops owl was first identified in 2003 and has since been spotted only on Lombok island, about 25 kilometers (15 miles) from the popular resort island of Bali. The findings were published Wednesday in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Seven months after its scientists made a landmark discovery that may explain the mysteries of mass, Europe's top physics lab will take a break from smashing invisible particles to recharge for the next leap into the unknown.

From Thursday, the cutting-edge facilities at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) will begin winding down, then go offline on Saturday for an 18-month upgrade.

Some U.S. scientists are helping search for evidence of alien life not by looking into outer space, but by studying some rocks right here on Earth.

Some of the rocks are up to 3.5 billion years old. The scientists are looking for crucial information to understand how life might have arisen elsewhere in the universe and guide the search for life on Mars one day.

Agricultural researchers on Tuesday said they had found a gene that boosts the digestibility of sorghum, transforming a humble grain into a potential famine-beater.

Sorghum (Latin name Sorghum bicolor) is a tough tropical cereal grown in dry regions of Africa, India and the southern United States.

An amount of freshwater almost the size of the Dead Sea has been lost in parts of the Middle East due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, according to a NASA study.

The study, to be published Friday in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, examined data over seven years from 2003 from a pair of gravity-measuring satellites which is part of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment or GRACE. Researchers found freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran along the Tigris and Euphrates river basins had lost 117 million acre feet (144 cubic kilometers) of its total stored freshwater, the second fastest loss of groundwater storage loss after India.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Tuesday told divided lawmakers he will act on climate change even if they do not, vowing to set ambitious long-term goals such as ending the car's dependence on oil.

Obama pledged to promote wind, solar and cleaner natural gas energy in the world's largest economy and called for the United States to cut the energy wasted by homes and businesses by half over the next 20 years.