A mysterious and sometimes fatal brain disease that has afflicted children in northeastern India for years could be linked to a toxic substance in litchi fruits, US researchers said Thursday.

Investigators say more research is needed to uncover the cause of the illness, which leads to seizures, altered mental state and death in more than a third of cases.

Each year around this time, NASA honors fallen astronauts, including the 17 men and women killed in three separate wintertime accidents in the sky and on the earth.

For Robert "Hoot" Gibson, it's a time to remember lost friends and some of their stunts, like playing a saxophone in orbit.

Japan's government said it will launch a back-up spy satellite on Sunday, after cancelling an earlier lift-off due to bad weather.

Tokyo put spy satellites into operation in the early 2000s after its elusive neighbour North Korea fired a mid-range ballistic missile over the Japanese mainland and into the western Pacific in 1998.

Average Americans hold vastly different opinions than scientists about animal experiments, climate change, genetically modified foods and offshore oil drilling, researchers said Thursday.

The largest opinion gap found in the study, published in the U.S. journal Science, was on whether genetically modified foods are safe to eat or not.

Just four bits of information gleaned from a shopper's credit card can be used to identify almost anyone, suggesting that even anonymous big data sets can breach individual privacy, researchers said Thursday.

The study in the journal Science crunched three months of credit card records for 1.1 million people in an unidentified industrialized country.

Charles H. Townes, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who helped create the laser that would revolutionize everything from medicine to manufacturing, has died. He was 99.

Townes had been in poor health before his death on the way to an Oakland hospital Tuesday, officials at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

An extensive survey of birds in Myanmar has revealed nearly two dozen not known to have existed in the country, including a large black seabird with a ballooning red neck sack and a tiny black and white falconet with a surprised, panda-like expression.

The Great Frigate and the Pied Falconet were among 20 previously undocumented birds spotted during a four-year field survey by the Bird and Nature Society, the Wildlife Conservation Society, Flora and Fauna International and several other bird-enthusiast associations, said Thet Zaw Naing, one of the surveyors.

Coral rely on algae for food and their survival.

So when the stress of warmer-than-average ocean temperatures prompted many of Hawaii's corals to expel algae last year — a phenomenon called bleaching because coral lose their color when they do this — many were worried they might die.

A new look at four fossils has revealed that snakes' earliest known ancestor lived as many as 70 million years earlier than thought, scientists said Tuesday.

Until now, the fossil record had suggested snakes slithered onto the scene in the Upper Cretaceous period, about 94-100 million years ago.

Rio Olympics organizers say sailing and windsurfing events will not be switched from Guanabara Bay, a picturesque vista marred by pollution, despite apparent disagreement on the extent to which the venue can be cleaned up in time.

Despite warnings from Rio state's new Environment Secretary, Andre Correa, that the city authorities could not guarantee to meet an official target of reducing pollution, Games' communications chief Mario Andrada told reporters the target stood.