Three astronauts set to travel to the International Space Station this month said Wednesday they had confidence in Russia's space program, despite a delay to their trip caused by the failed launch of a cargo craft.

NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren, who will be making his first space voyage, admitted he and his colleagues were "disappointed" their launch had to be delayed from its planned date in May, but said the crew had faith in the Russian spacecraft.

Using bait attached to underwater cameras at 400 reefs worldwide, scientists are embarking on their first-ever attempt to count the world's sharks, researchers said Tuesday.

By 2018, the program, called Global FinPrint, aims to provide a clear picture of where shark populations are healthy and where they are struggling, and how sharks impact the health of coral reefs.

Nearly 2,000 climate scientists gathered in Paris Tuesday, just five months before the deadline for a historic carbon-curbing pact, to remind politicians it is not too late to limit dangerous planet warming.

"The world is at a critical crossroads," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message read to the academic gathering.

Zimbabwe has shipped 24 elephant calves to China, in a move that has angered animal rights groups who described the export as "extremely cruel".

"Some 24 elephants are on route to China as we speak after they were taken from their families in Hwange National Park," Johnny Rodrigues, charirman of the animal rights group Conservation Taskforce told Agence France Presse.

More than 1,800 dried chameleons on their way to Asia have been seized in Burkina Faso, officials said Monday.

The chameleons -- which are protected in Burkina Faso -- were packed in boxes and had a combined weight of around 29 kilos (64 pounds). They were headed to countries like China and the Philippines, where some believe they have medicinal powers.

NASA briefly lost touch this weekend with an unmanned spacecraft on its way to a historic encounter with Pluto, but the U.S. space agency said Monday the glitch has been fixed.

The communications blackout on Saturday lasted nearly an hour and half, and perplexed scientists as they tried to figure out what had gone wrong aboard the New Horizons spacecraft nearly three billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from Earth.

Astronomers proposed a novel explanation Monday for the strange appearance of the comet carrying Europe's robot probe Philae through outer space: alien microscopic life.

Many of the frozen dust ball’s features, which include a black crust over lakes of ice, flat-bottomed craters and mega-boulders scattered on the surface, were "consistent" with the presence of microbes, they said.

Can an algorithm pass for an author? Can a robot rock the house? A series of contests at Dartmouth College is about to find out.

Dartmouth is seeking artificial intelligence algorithms that create "human-quality" short stories, sonnets and dance music sets that will be pitted against human-produced literature, poetry and music selections. The judges won't know which is which.

Russia's Progress M-28M cargo ship pictured on the launch pad shortly before …

An unmanned Russian cargo ship successfully docked with the International Space Station on Sunday following a string of failed attempts to resupply the orbital laboratory.

Groggy on their paws after waking from tranquilizers, lions have returned to Rwanda for the first time since the endangered animal was wiped out following the country's 1994 genocide.

Seven lions -- two males and five females -- were transported in a marathon 30-hour journey from South Africa - first by air, then the final stretch by road to Rwanda's eastern Akagera National Park.