China will launch a manned space mission on Monday, official media said, as the Asian giant works towards setting up its own space station. 

Hurricane Matthew lashed NASA's rocket launch facility at Cape Canaveral on Friday, forcing power outages and damaging roofs as it battered the Florida coast with wind gusts, the U.S. space agency said.

Rockets, spaceships and crucial equipment for the U.S. space program and private companies like SpaceX are all stored in the area, which is home to Kennedy Space Center (KSC). 

A rocky planet discovered in the "habitable" zone of the star nearest our Sun may be covered with oceans, researchers at France's CNRS research institute said Thursday.

A trio of French, British and Dutch scientists won the Nobel Chemistry Prize on Wednesday for developing molecular machines, the world's smallest machines that may one day act as artificial muscles to power tiny robots or even prosthetic limbs.

The study of "strange states" of matter, which may one day yield superfast and small computers, earned British scientists David Thouless, Duncan Haldane and Michael Kosterlitz the Nobel Physics Prize on Tuesday.

Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan on Monday won the Nobel Medicine Prize for his work on autophagy -- a process whereby cells "eat themselves" -- which when disrupted can cause Parkinson's and diabetes.

The mysterious explosion of a SpaceX rocket last month took an odd turn with a "cordial" encounter between staff of Elon Musk's firm and fierce rival United Launch Alliance, The Washington Post reported.

No one was hurt in the September 1 blast, which came as the unmanned Falcon 9 rocket was being fueled ahead of a standard, pre-launch test in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Europe's pioneering Rosetta spacecraft concluded a 12-year odyssey with a controlled crash-landing Friday onto the comet it has orbited and probed for two years to unravel the secrets of the Solar System's birth, mission controllers said.

Wild cheering erupted in the mission control centre in Darmstadt, as spacecraft operations manager Sylvain Lodiot announced the official end of mission.

One of the biggest dinosaur footprints ever recorded has been unearthed in the Gobi Desert, researchers said Friday, offering a fresh clue about the giant creatures that roamed the earth millions of years ago.

A joint Mongolian-Japanese expedition found the giant print, which measures 106 centimetres (42 inches) long and 77 centimetres wide.

It's serendipity: from America to Viagra, history is full of great discoveries helped along by chance, as more than a century of Nobel prizes can attest.

Among the chance discoveries that have been honoured with the prestigious prize are X-rays (physics, 1901), penicillin (medicine, 1945), fullerenes that paved the way for nanotechnology (chemistry, 1996), conductive polymers (chemistry, 2000), and the bacteria responsible for ulcers (medicine, 2005).