California announced Friday it was slapping water restrictions on some of the oldest water rights holders in the parched U.S. state, the first such measures in four decades.

The cuts by the western state, gripped by the fourth year of a punishing drought, will restrict water use by over 100 farmers and others with rights dating back to 1903.

South Korea's oldest nuclear reactor is expected to be shut down permanently in 2017 after growing safety concerns over the ageing facility.

A state energy committee has decided to urge the state-financed Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co. (KHNP) to close the Gori Reactor No.1 in the southern port of Busan.

Japan's government approved Friday a revised 30- to 40-year roadmap to clean up the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, but many questions remain.

The plan, endorsed by Cabinet members and officials, delays the start of a key initial step — the removal of spent fuel in storage pools at each of the three melted reactors — by up to three years due to earlier mishaps and safety problems at the plant.

British Nobel Prize-winning scientist Tim Hunt has resigned from his post at University College London over controversial comments he made about female scientists.

Hunt, who holds other posts, has apologized for causing offence after suggesting that female scientists could not take criticism without crying, and that relationships between men and women in the laboratory disrupted work.

Three astronauts landed in Kazakhstan on Thursday, safely returning to Earth after their flight back home was delayed for a month by a Russian rocket failure.

Russia's Anton Shkaplerov, Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti and Terry Virts of the United States landed on schedule on the steppes of Kazakhstan and appeared to be in good health.

A solar-powered plane that got stuck in Japan during an attempt to fly around the world is fixed and ready to go -- as soon as the weather gets better, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

Solar Impulse 2 was diverted to the central city of Nagoya on its way between China and Hawaii because of a developing cold front over the Pacific that could have made its record-breaking journey too difficult.

Miners in northwestern Canada have discovered ice age camel bones whose DNA is forcing scientists to redraw the family tree of the now-extinct species.

Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Yukon's Department of Tourism and Culture, said three fossils recovered from a gold mine in the Klondike in 2008 are the first western camel bones found in the territory or Alaska in decades.

An experimental solar sail is being called a success three weeks after its arrival in space.

The Planetary Society said Wednesday its test flight resulted in an almost full deployment of the sail — an estimated 90 percent to 95 percent of the 344-square feet (32 sq. meters) light and shiny surface — and has set the stage for a follow-up mission next year.

Scientists said Tuesday they have discovered what appear to be red blood cells and collagen fibres in dinosaur bones, a find that may boost prospects of prising organic remains from a much wider range of fossils.

Using molecular microscopy, a British team analysed eight bone fragments from dinosaurs that lived some 75 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period.

The orbiting International Space Station has shifted in position after an engine glitch on a docked spacecraft which is due to bring astronauts back to Earth this week, Russia said. 

The engines of the Soyuz spacecraft "switched on unscheduled which led to an insignificant change in the position of the ISS", Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said in a statement on its website.