Seven out of 15 scientists recently recognized for their outstanding contributions by The National Council for Scientific Research (CNRS) are faculty members from the American University of Beirut, a press release said Wednesday.

The CNRS recently distributed research excellence awards during a special celebration marking its Golden Jubilee, held at the Grand Serail on June 6, 2012, under the patronage of Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

NASA is poised to launch on Wednesday a sophisticated orbiting telescope that uses high-energy X-ray vision to hunt for black holes in the universe.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) will first be carried into the skies by a jet which will deploy a rocket that sends the satellite into space, NASA said.

Plans to build a 1.6-billion-euro ($2 billion) particle accelerator in Germany cleared the first main hurdle Tuesday when authorities gave the go-ahead for construction to begin.

The environment minister for the regional state of Hesse, Lucia Puttrich, officially gave the green light for a new giant Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR), which is to be built on a 20-hectare site in Darmstadt, not far from Frankfurt.

The Swiss sun-powered plane Solar Impulse is preparing to take off Wednesday from Rabat to southern Morocco's desert region in its first, and potentially dangerous, flight in a hot and arid climate.

The prototype piloted by Swiss Andre Borschberg plans to take off from Rabat's Sale airport at 0700 GMT and fly south to the city of Ouarzazate where it is expected to land sometime after 2300 GMT Wednesday, or past midnight local time, a statement said Tuesday.

A team of Japanese astronomers using telescopes on Hawaii say they've seen the oldest galaxy, a discovery that's competing with other "earliest galaxy" claims.

The Japanese team calculates its galaxy was formed 12.91 billion light-years ago, and their research will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. The scientists with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan used the Subaru and Keck telescopes on the summit of Mauna Kea.

NASA's Mars rover, nicknamed Curiosity, is zeroing in on its August landing on the Red Planet and aims to touch down closer than expected to its mountain target, the U.S. space agency said Monday.

With a mission to use its roving toolkit to drill for signs that microbial life may have once existed on Mars, the rover is now set to land about four miles (6.5 kilometers) closer to the mountain than initially planned.

Zoologists have for the first time bred a critically endangered turtle species using an artificial beach, Bangladeshi specialists announced on Monday.

The northern river terrapin, scientific name Batagur baska, is extinct in the wild in Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam, and survives only in tiny numbers in Bangladesh, India, Malaysia and Indonesia.

A NASA spacecraft orbiting Mars is in safe mode after it detected a problem.

The Mars Odyssey, which has been circling the red planet since 2001, noticed something odd with one of its gyroscope-like devices that helps control its orientation and entered standby mode as a precaution Thursday evening.

Parasitic mites linked to the deaths of millions of bee colonies worldwide may have destroyed them by incubating a potent virus and spreading it through the hives, according to a new report.

The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain the mysterious collapse of bee colonies in recent years, a threat to plant life and agriculture, which depend on the honey-making insects for pollination.

China will launch a spacecraft this month to conduct its first manned space docking, state media said Saturday, the latest step in a plan aimed at giving the country a permanent space station by 2020.

The Shenzhou-9 spacecraft and its carrier rocket have already been moved to the launch platform at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in northwest China, the Xinhua news agency said, quoting the country's manned space programme.