As a child, Liu Yang once wanted to be a bus conductor and later had her sights set on becoming a lawyer, but decades later she is set to travel into space as China's first ever female astronaut.

It was a visit by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to her school in central China that changed young Liu's mind as she realized she wanted to become a pilot -- a decision that eventually saw her take on the historic role.

Certain oil and gas operations that involve injecting wastewater underground can cause earthquakes, but the risk from hydraulic fracturing is generally low, said a U.S. scientific report Friday.

The report by the National Research Council found that the most significant risk of earthquakes is linked to secondary injection of wastewater below ground to help capture remaining hydrocarbons from a petroleum reservoir.

Unlikely candidates for box office stardom, a team of Japanese physicists may soon be in high demand with moviemakers after devising a formula to predict how successful a film is likely to be.

The team from Tottori University devised a set of mathematical models that measure how much money was spent on advertising before a movie is released, over what period of time, and how much talk the film generated in social media.

A manned Chinese submersible on Friday set a new record for the country's deepest ever sea dive at 6,000 meters (19,685 feet), state media said.

The "Jiaolong" craft descended to that depth in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean, the first in a series of six planned dives which will culminate at 7,000 meters, the official Xinhua news agency said.

Scientists have found new evidence they say supports the theory that a knuckle bone and other human remains found under a church floor in Bulgaria may be of John the Baptist.

The relics found in a small marble sarcophagus two years ago on a Bulgarian island called Sveti Ivan, which translates as Saint John, also included a human tooth, part of a skull and three animal bones.

A newly discovered asteroid the size of a city block will zoom past Earth but poses no risk of a collision, astronomers said on Thursday.

The "unusually large" asteroid will not be visible to the naked eye, but asteroid enthusiasts may watch it pass by during a live online broadcast, said Patrick Paolucci, president of the skywatchers' site Slooh.

Rising temperatures, changing vegetation and the spread of humans all contributed to the extinction of the woolly mammoth, according to a new study that said no single factor was to blame.

The tusked mammal's demise was gradual, not sudden, said the authors, disputing earlier assertions that the giants were wiped out quickly -- either by disease, humans or a catastrophic weather event.

Scientists said Wednesday they have cracked the genetic code of the bonobo and found the ape had some DNA encryption more in common with humans than even its closest relative, the chimpanzee.

The bonobo is the last of the so-called great apes to have its genome sequenced, after those of chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans.

The world's science academies on Thursday warned the upcoming Rio Summit that Earth faced a dangerous double whammy posed by voracious consumption and a population explosion.

The warning was issued by 105 academies ahead of the June 20-22 U.N. conference on sustainable development, where leaders will debate the planet's worsening environmental health and its entrenched poverty.

Either Wang Yaping or Liu Yang -- both advanced fighter pilots -- is set to become a heavenly heroine to a billion Chinese when one of them becomes the country's first female "taikonaut".

Wang or Liu is expected to earn a seat in the Shenzhou IX spacecraft, to be placed in orbit by a Long March rocket fired from the Jiuquan space base in the Gobi desert. State media say the launch will happen "around mid-June".