Russia will continue using the International Space Station along with NASA until 2024, its space agency said, after Moscow had threatened to stop financing it in 2020.

Roscosmos has finalized a plan for its activities up to 2030 which "provides for the use of the ISS until 2024," the space agency said in a statement late Tuesday.

The love hormone, known formally as Oxytocin, may have another unexpected effect. When tested on intoxicated lab rats, it helped them act as if they were sober, international researchers said Monday.

The tests have only been done in lab rats so far, but those injected with oxytocin and fed alcohol seemed able to overcome the failures in motor coordination that the drunken rats suffered.

Corals in the Great Barrier Reef are eating small plastic debris in the ocean, Australian researchers said Tuesday, raising fears about the impact the indigestible fragments have on their health and other marine life.

The scientists found that when they placed corals from the reef into plastic-contaminated water, the marine life "ate plastic at rates only slightly lower than their normal rate of feeding on marine plankton", the study published in the journal Marine Biology said.

Chocolate lovers take heart: a steamy greenhouse near London is helping to ensure that cocoa crops globally remain disease-free and bountiful to cope with the growing appetite for sweet treats.

On a winter morning, the temperature is a chilly eight degrees Celsius but inside the International Cocoa Quarantine Centre (ICQC), which simulates tropical conditions, the air is a balmy 23 degrees.

Climate scientists went ahead with a scheduled meeting in Kenya despite the absence of the United Nations' top climate change official who faces sexual harassment allegations.

Experts gathering in Nairobi on Monday said the absence of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), would not affect this week's meeting.

Sensors at the Fukushima nuclear plant have detected a fresh leak of highly radioactive water to the sea, the plant's operator announced Sunday, highlighting difficulties in decommissioning the crippled plant.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said the sensors, which were rigged to a gutter that pours rain and ground water at the Fukushima Daiichi plant to a nearby bay, detected contamination levels up to 70 times greater than the already-high radioactive status seen at the plant campus.

Japanese researchers have built a pair of clocks which they say are so accurate they will lose a second only every 16 billion years -- longer than the Earth has been around.

"Cryogenic optical lattice clocks" are not pretty -- they look more like giant stripped-down desktop computers than ordinary wall clocks -- but they are so precise that current technology cannot even measure them.

Two U.S. astronauts wearing what NASA assured are "healthy" spacesuits prepared for a spacewalk Saturday to lay cable outside the International Space Station, after an equipment failure briefly delayed the mission.

Commander Barry "Butch" Wilmore and flight engineer Terry Virts were expected to begin at around 1250 GMT the first of several spacewalks aimed at preparing the orbiting outpost for the arrival of U.S. commercial crew capsules, bringing astronauts to low-Earth orbit in the coming years.

India's filthy air is cutting 660 million lives short by about three years, while nearly all of the country's 1.2 billion citizens are breathing in harmful pollution levels, according to research published Saturday.

The new study by a team of environmental economists at U.S. universities highlights just how extensive India's air problems have become after years of pursuing an all-growth agenda with little regard for the environment. While New Delhi last year earned the dubious title of being the world's most polluted city, the problem extends nationwide, with 13 Indian cities now on the World Health Organization's list of the 20 most polluted.

A campaign to get universities to stop investing in greenhouse gas-producing fuels came deep into energy country Friday as activists asked the University of Colorado to divest from coal and petroleum companies.

The university's governing Board of Regents took no action on the request from a student group called Fossil Free CU, but two of the nine regents praised the activists for raising the issue and said they wanted to hear more.