NASA officials say the Curiosity rover has made its first scoop of the surface of planet Mars and has detected a bright object on the ground.

Officials said in a news release Monday that they suspect the object might be a part of the six-wheeled rover, but they won't sample or scoop anymore until they figure out what it is.

An Austrian daredevil is hoping to make an unprecedented leap from the edge of space Tuesday, setting records as he breaks the speed of sound in freefall in the skies above the U.S. state of New Mexico.

Felix Baumgartner will ascend to 120,000 feet -- nearly 23 miles, or 36 km -- in a capsule taken up to the edge of the stratosphee by a gigantic helium balloon, before stepping out in a pressurized suit to fall back to earth.

The Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, famed for seeking "happiness" for its citizens, is aiming to become the first nation in the world to turn its home-grown food and farmers 100-percent organic.

The tiny Buddhist-majority nation wedged between China and India has an unusual and some say enviable approach to economic development, centered on protecting the environment and focusing on mental well-being.

Research in reprogrammed cells, which on Monday earned the 2012 Nobel Prize, has been hailed as a new dawn for regenerative medicine but remains troubled by several clouds.

Britain's John Gurdon and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka were honored with the world's paramount award in medicine for induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

A cargo-laden capsule on Monday was on its way to the International Space Station on NASA's first privately-run supply mission after a successful blast-off atop SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

The capsule named Dragon reached orbit and spread its two wing-like solar antennas 10 minutes after the rocket pierced the night sky over the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida late Sunday.

On July 4, scientists announced they had discovered a new particle that may be the fabled Higgs boson, an exploit that would rank as the greatest achievement in physics in more than half a century.

But they also created a headache for the jury that will decide next Tuesday's Nobel Prize for Physics.

An Australian research team said Monday they have found an effective way to kill the destructive crown-of-thorns starfish, which is devastating coral reefs across the Pacific and Indian oceans.

The discovery by James Cook University's Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Queensland state comes after a study showed the Great Barrier Reef had lost more than half its coral cover in the past 27 years.

A new search has begun at a Greek island where an ancient device known as the world's "oldest computer" was found over a century ago, an official said Thursday, adding that other discoveries were possible.

Archaeologists this week returned to Antikythera, the Aegean Sea island where sponge divers in 1900-1901 found the so-called Antikythera Mechanism, a remarkable 2nd-century BCE device that tracked the cycles of the solar system.

Australia on Friday unveiled a colossal radio telescope that will allow astronomers to detect distant galaxies and explore the depths of the universe with unprecedented precision.

The Australian SKA Pathfinder telescope, at the remote Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in the Western Australian desert, is made up of 36 antennas, each 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter.

An 11-year-old boy from a nomadic family in Russia's north has stumbled upon a massive well-preserved woolly mammoth, in what scientists describe as the best such discovery since 1901.

Yevgeny Salinder, whose family lives near a polar station in the northern Taimyr Peninsula, discovered the frozen prehistoric animal when he was strolling along the banks of the Yenisei River in late August.