A team of international researchers has decoded the genome of the pigeon, 5,000 years after it was first domesticated, according to a study published Thursday.

Known as Columba livia, the rock pigeon is considered among the most common and varied species on the planet, consisting of 350 breeds with a slew of different features, and is among just a few bird genomes sequenced so far.

A Russian rocket carrying a U.S. telecommunications satellite plunged into the Pacific Ocean on Friday only moments after being launched from a mobile sea platform.

"There was an accident during the Zenit rocket launch," a source at the Energia corporation that makes the Zenit-3SL rocket used to launch the Intelsat satellite said by telephone.

The EU urged national governments on Thursday to ban pesticides deemed dangerous to bees by scientific experts in a bid to prevent a disastrous collapse in colony numbers for an insect considered vital to the integrity of the human food chain.

European Commission spokesman Frederic Vincent said the European Union executive had proposed a "two-year ban" on the use of three so-called neonicotinoid insecticides used in maize, rapeseed, sunflower and cotton cultivation.

Poachers have killed 57 rhinos from South Africa's national parks since the beginning of the month, a rate of almost two a day, officials said Thursday.

Despite stepped up anti-poaching operations, the Department of Environmental Affairs said 42 rhino alone had been poached in Kruger National Park, a vast wilderness that straddled the Mozambique border.

Australian researchers investigating the extinction of the country's Tasmanian Tiger put the fault solely with humans Thursday, saying they had debunked a long-held theory that disease was to blame.

The last known tiger, or thylacine, died in Hobart Zoo in September 1936 and though there have been numerous unconfirmed sightings in the wild over the years since, it was officially declared extinct in 1986.

Climate scientists said Wednesday they found evidence to back predictions for a future with lower average rainfall, even though Earth's past warming episodes had led to more precipitation, not less.

Writing in the journal Nature, researchers said they had found proof that global warming caused by Man's greenhouse-gas emissions has a different effect on rainfall than warming caused by increased solar radiation.

Google on Wednesday launched a global science fair by inviting students around the world to present ideas that could change the world and perhaps become the next Ada Lovelace.

Lovelace was a teenager in the early 1800s when she became fascinated with math and went on to write what is considered to be the first computer program.

A genetic variant commonly found in Chinese people may help explain why some got seriously ill with swine flu, a discovery scientists say could help pinpoint why flu viruses hit some populations particularly hard and change how they are treated.

Less than one percent of Caucasians are thought to have the gene alteration, which has previously been linked to severe influenza. Yet about 25 percent of Chinese people have the gene variant, which is also common in Japanese and Korean people.

A smoker's craving to light up can be tamed by carefully targeted magnetic fields applied to the brain, a senior researcher from a Japanese-Canadian team said Wednesday.

Scientists managed to zoom in on the exact spots that drive the need for nicotine, noting that a mental connection made when a smoker is able to have a cigarette markedly increases the desire to spark up.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say: the more housework married men do, the less sex they have, according to a new study published Wednesday.

Husbands who spend more time doing traditionally female chores -- such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping -- reported having less sex than those who do more masculine tasks, said the study in the American Sociological Review.