Chimpanzees and humans share some of the basic brain skills needed for cooking, a finding that may explain a turning point in the story of mankind, a study said Wednesday.

Experiments at a chimp sanctuary suggest a common ancestor imparted these cognitive abilities to apes and humans alike, it said.

Sunshine-powered Solar Impulse 2, which has made an impromptu stop in Japan on its way around the world, was under cover in its mobile hangar Wednesday as the team waited out the weather before heading to Hawaii.

The featherweight flying machine had been exposed to the elements since its arrival in the central city of Nagoya on Monday night, with crew having to hold it down to prevent it being blown away by the wind.

Dutch scientists have developed a revolutionary system that could one day help isolated villages around the world steadily generate electricity from mundane water-logged plants such as rice growing in paddy fields.

"It's based on the principle that plants produce more energy than they need," said Marjolein Helder, co-founder of Plant-e, which makes products that harvest energy from living plants. 

The pilot of record-breaking Solar Impulse 2 pledged Tuesday to continue his adventure after the high-tech aircraft made an unexpected stop in Japan to avoid bad weather.

The landing in Nagoya, on Japan's main island, concluded what had been the aircraft's longest non-stop period of flight.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Tuesday he would pledge a 26 percent cut in the country's greenhouse gas emissions, ahead of a global summit on climate change this year.

Abe also promised to take a "leading role" in the international drive to reduce pollutants blamed for global warming.

U.N. climate talks were to resume in Bonn on Monday, tasked with sculpting a historic deal on greenhouse gases due to be sealed in Paris little more than six months from now.

The 10-day conference will be opened by French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, who will steer the Paris talks, and Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru's environment minister, who chaired the last big climate parlay in Lima last December.

Solar Impulse 2 will land in the Japanese city of Nagoya, organizers said Monday, as bad weather delayed a landmark attempt by a solar plane to cross the Pacific Ocean.

"Weather deteriorating over Pacific, decision taken for intermediate landing in Nagoya and wait for better conditions," tweeted Bertrand Piccard, the initiator of the mission.

Russian space officials say this month's launch failure of a Proton rocket was due to excessive vibrations in the engine of the rocket's third stage.

Igor Komarov, head of the Roscosmos space agency, told reporters Friday that the vibrations came from a rotor shaft and were due to the material it was made of. He said using a different material to solve the problem would not be excessively costly, but he didn't specify an amount.

A string of popular California beaches will remain closed until further notice due to mystery oil-based pollution, officials said Friday.

The stretch of coastline south of Los Angeles was closed to the public from Wednesday, barely a week after an oil spill 100 miles further north, although there is still no confirmed link between the two.

The sudden deaths of tens of thousands of endangered antelopes in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan over the past two weeks have left scientists scrambling for answers and conservationists worried about the animal's future.

Over 120,000 rare saiga antelopes -- more than a third of the total global population -- have been wiped out in a devastating blow that the United Nations Environment Program has called "catastrophic".