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.

Salmon that is genetically modified to grow twice as fast as normal could soon show up on dinner plates — if the company that makes the fish can stay afloat.

After weathering concerns about the safety and environment impact of the salmon, Aquabounty in 2010 was to poised to become the world's first company to sell fish whose DNA has been altered to speed up growth. But the a government agency has not approved the fish, and Aquabounty is running out of money.

The lions that roam Africa's savannahs have lost as much as 75 percent of their habitat in the last 50 years as humans overtake their land and the lion population dwindles, said a study released Tuesday.

Researchers at Duke University, including prominent conservationist Stuart Pimm, warn that the number of lions across the continent have dropped to as few as 32,000, with populations in West Africa under incredible pressure.

The Mars rover Curiosity has offered a tantalizing taste of evidence that there was once life on the Red Planet, but scientists said Monday it is too soon to make much of the first soil analyses.

NASA's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments have been sending back information as it hunts for compounds such as methane, as well as hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, that are the building blocks of life.