India plans to launch a space probe that will orbit Mars, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirmed on Wednesday after press reports that the mission was scheduled to begin late next year.

The project would mark another step in the country's ambitious space program, which placed a probe on the moon three years ago and envisages its first manned mission in 2016.

Anthropologists have dealt a blow to theories that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, bequeathing humans today with some of the genetic legacy of their mysterious cousins.

Over the last two years, several studies have suggested that H. sapiens got it on with Neanderthals, an enigmatic hominid who lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for up to 300,000 years but vanished some 30-40,000 years ago.

Genetic mutations have been found in three generations of butterflies from near Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, scientists said Tuesday, raising fears radiation could affect other species.

Around 12 percent of pale grass blue butterflies that were exposed to nuclear fallout as larvae immediately after the tsunami-sparked disaster had abnormalities, including smaller wings and damaged eyes, researchers said.

An African elephant in Vienna Zoo has been impregnated using frozen sperm from a male living in the wild, in what the Zoo said Monday was a world first.

Pregnancy has been achieved before elsewhere using frozen sperm in two cases, once with an African elephant and once with an Asian one, but both times the males were in captivity and the fetuses died, a zoo spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday ribbed scientists behind NASA's roving robot Curiosity, instructing them to let him know right away if they found life on Mars.

"If in fact, you do make contact with Martians, please let me know right away," Obama joked, as he called the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California from Air Force One.

Bats in the bleachers of Olympic Stadium? Now there's an Olympic legacy to give many people nightmares.

But not Kim Olliver. Faced with the prospect of having bats take up residence in the girders of Olympic stadium, Olliver, the senior ecologist for the London Olympics, could barely contain her joy.

The U.N. chief Sunday announced an initiative to protect oceans from pollution and over-fishing and to combat rising sea levels which threaten hundreds of millions of people.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the initiative, called the Oceans Compact, sets out a strategic vision for the U.N. system to work more effectively to tackle the "precarious state" of the world's seas.

A mass of small volcanic rocks nearly the size of Belgium has been discovered floating off the coast of New Zealand.

The stretch of golf-ball-size pumice rocks was first spotted this week by a New Zealand air force plane about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) northeast of Auckland. The rocks stretch for about 26,000 square kilometers (10,000 square miles).

A conservationist says seven of the world's rarest rhinoceroses were photographed at a national park in Indonesia. It is the first sighting there in 26 years.

Tarmizi, from the Leuser International Foundation, said Thursday that pictures from movement-triggered cameras identified a male and six female Sumatran rhinos in Aceh province's Leuser National Park as of April.

Earlier this week NASA safely landed a robotic rover on Mars about 150 million miles (241.39 million kilometers) away. But on Thursday here on Earth, a test model planetary lander crashed and burned at Kennedy Space Center in Florida just seconds after liftoff.

The spider-like spacecraft called Morpheus was on a test flight at Cape Canaveral when it tilted, crashed to the ground and erupted in flames. It got only a few feet up in the air, NASA said.