Earth's largest radio telescope is growing more powerful by the day on this remote plateau high above Chile's Atacama desert, where visitors often feel like they're planting the first human footprints on the red crust of Mars.

The 16,400-foot (5,000-meter) altitude, thin air and mercurial climate here can be unbearable. Visitors must breathe oxygen from a tank just to keep from fainting. Winds reach 62 mph (100 km) and temperatures drop to 10 below zero (minus 25 Celsius).

More than three million years ago, ancient ancestors of humans were walking upright -- but they could still climb trees like monkeys, a study showed Thursday in the U.S. journal "Science."

Based on careful analysis of a pair of shoulder blades -- both exceptionally well-preserved from a skeleton of a three-year-old Australopithecus afarensis girl -- scientists were able to settle a question intensely debated by anthropologists for more than three decades.

Thousands of people in an eastern Chinese city clashed with police while protesting the proposed expansion of a petrochemical factory that they say would spew pollution and damage public health, townspeople said Saturday.

Pollution has become a major source of unrest in China, as members of the rising middle class become more outspoken against environmentally risky projects in their backyards.

Dung beetles wearing tiny silicon boots have let scientists in on a long-guarded secret -- they use the balls of manure they collect as mobile air conditioning units, a study said Thursday.

The ground temperature in the African savannah can reach 60 degrees Celsius (140 Fahrenheit), causing most insects to scramble for shadow spots or flee up blades of grass for relief.

Scientists in Canada have unearthed the first fossils of a feathered dinosaur ever found in the Americas, the journal Science reported on Thursday.

The 75 million year old fossil specimens, uncovered in the badlands of Alberta, Canada, include remains of a juvenile and two adult ostrich-like creatures known as ornithomimids.

South Korea suspended its third attempt to send a satellite into orbit by at least three days Friday, after a helium leak was detected in the rocket just hours before scheduled launch time.

With only a five-day launch window that ends October 30, any further delay could result in a much lengthier postponement, officials at the Naro Space Center told reporters.

Higher-than-normal radiation levels found in fish caught off Japan's east coast more than a year after the Fukushima nuclear disaster could indicate the plant is still leaking, new research says.

Marine chemist Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution reviewed official Japanese data on caesium levels in fish, shellfish and seaweed collected near the crippled nuclear plant.

Much of the U.S. East Coast has a good chance of getting blasted by gale-force winds, flooding, heavy rain and maybe even snow early next week by an unusual hybrid of hurricane and winter storm, federal and private forecasters say.

Though still projecting several days ahead of Halloween week, the computer models are spooking meteorologists. Government scientists said Wednesday the storm has a 70 percent chance of smacking the Northeast and mid-Atlantic.

Astronomers said Wednesday they have produced an image capturing some 84 million stars at our universe's core in a massive survey of the Milky Way.

The team's achievement at the Paranal observatory in northern Chile has been billed as the largest survey to date of stars in our galaxy -- multi-gigapixel.

Scientists have created embryos with genes from one man and two women, using a provocative technique that could someday be used to prevent babies from inheriting certain rare incurable diseases.

The researchers at Oregon Health & Sciences University said they are not using the embryos to produce children, and it is not clear when or even if this technique will be put to use. But it has already stirred a debate over its risks and ethics in Britain, where scientists did similar work a few years ago.