Two former top NASA officials unveiled plans Thursday to sell manned flights to the moon by the end of the decade, in an announcement 40 years after the last human set foot there.

Spaceflight, long the province of national governments, has moved toward increased commercialization in recent years, with private companies for the first time successfully launching rockets into orbit.

Scientists Friday warned of an alarming increase in the death rates of the largest living organisms on the planet, the giant, old trees that harbor and sustain countless birds and wildlife.

Research by universities in Australia and the United States, published in Science, said ecosystems worldwide were in danger of losing forever their largest and oldest trees unless there were policy changes to better protect them.

Two Mexican textile factories that supply clothing for global fashion brands such as Levi's are dumping toxic chemicals into the environment, Greenpeace said Wednesday.

The environmental group said it found hazardous chemicals in samples taken from waste water discharges at the two facilities, run by Mexico's Lavamex and Kaltex companies, which dye and wash denim textiles.

Mosquito control officials in the Florida Keys are waiting for the federal government to sign off on an experiment that would release hundreds of thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes to reduce the risk of dengue fever in the tourist town of Key West.

If approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it would be the first such experiment in the U.S. Some Key West residents worry, though, that not enough research has been done to determine the risks that releasing genetically modified mosquitoes might pose to the Keys' fragile ecosystem.

Covering nearly 300 football fields in a remote patch of desert, the Shams 1 solar project carries off plenty of symbolic significance for the United Arab Emirates.

It will be the first, large-scale solar project in the oil-rich country when it is completed at the end of the year, and the largest of its kind in the Middle East. At full capacity, the 100-megawatt, concentrated solar project will be able to power 20,000 homes. For those behind the project, it's the surest sign yet that solar is coming to the region in a big way.

New images of the Moon's battered crust point to a violent past in which it was battered by comets and asteroids during its first billion years, U.S. scientists say.

The new findings come from the GRAIL mission, a pair of spacecraft named Ebb and Flow that are orbiting the Moon and measuring its gravitational field.

Cigarette butts are widely reviled as an urban nuisance but birds in Mexico City see them as a boon, apparently using them to deter parasites from their nests, scientists say.

Local sparrows and finches incorporate smoked cigarette butts in their nests to provide cosy cellulose lining for their chicks and nicotine to ward off mites, they believe.

Africa's savannahs and the lions that roam there are disappearing at an alarming rate as ballooning human populations deprive the big cats of their natural habitat, a study released Tuesday showed.

About 75 percent of the continent's savannahs and two-thirds of the lion population have vanished over the past 50 years, according to researchers at Duke University in North Carolina.

NASA plans to send a new rover to Mars in 2020 as it prepares for a manned mission to the Red Planet, the U.S. space agency said Tuesday.

The announcement came a day after NASA released the results of the first soil tested by the Curiosity rover, which found traces of some of the compounds like water and oxygen that are necessary for life.

Australian researchers are working on a new breed of pineapple -- one that is not only sweet and juicy but which has the added tropical taste of coconut.

In what is thought to be a world first, the Department of Agriculture in Queensland state is in the final stages of developing the new variety of the fruit, to be known as the AusFestival pineapple.