Japan's Panasonic will develop a water purification system together with India's Tata Group, tapping into a fast-growing market in Asia, a media report said Saturday.

The electronics giant has developed a prototype of a device that will detoxify harmful substances in groundwater, making it potentially safe to drink, the Japanese economic daily Nikkei said.

A long-gone group of ancient people known as Paleo-Eskimos lived in isolation in the North American Arctic for more than 4,000 years, said a study on Thursday.

They trekked from Siberia across the Bering Strait to their new home, and made no contact with other cultures who'd made the same journey at different times in history, including Native Americans and the Inuit people.

Music triggers different functions of the brain, which helps explain why listening to a song you like might be enjoyable but a favorite song may plunge you into nostalgia, scientists said on Thursday.

Neuroscientists in the United States used a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner to map brain activity in 21 young volunteers as they listened to different types of music, including rock, rap and classical.

For years scientists have theorized about how large rocks — some weighing hundreds of pounds — zigzag across Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park, leaving long trails etched in the earth.

Now two researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, have photographed these "sailing rocks" being blown by light winds across the former lake bed.

Contagious yawning is a behavior shared by chimpanzees, baboons, dogs and humans, and researchers said Wednesday that wolves can do it too, suggesting that empathy among animals is a common trait.

The research in the journal PLOS ONE focused on a pack of 12 captive wolves at the Tama Zoological Park in Tokyo, Japan.

The U.S. space agency's powerful deep-space rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), aims to blast off for the first time in 2018, NASA said Wednesday.

The SLS has been in development for three years already, and when finished it should propel spacecraft beyond Earth's orbit and eventually launch crew vehicles to Mars by the 2030s.

A lab sited under 1.4 kilometers (4,500 feet) of rock has detected particles from the Sun that help to measure activity at the very heart of our star, scientists said Wednesday.

Deep beneath Italy's Apennine Mountains, the laboratory recorded low-energy neutrinos spewed out by the fusion of hydrogen protons, the mechanism by which the Sun's core generates energy, they said.

Biologists on Wednesday said the genetic machinery of humans, fruit flies and roundworms was similar in many surprising ways, a discovery that could help basic research into disease.

A consortium of more than 200 scientists compared the genome of modern man with that of two creatures widely studied in the lab -- the fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster) and a tiny creature called roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans).

Police in Brazil have broken up an Amazon deforestation gang considered the worst currently active, officials said Wednesday.

The gang would invade public land in northern Para state, burn down forest, divided the land into parcels and sell them, federal police said in a statement.

Global warming is here, human-caused and probably already dangerous — and it's increasingly likely that the heating trend could be irreversible, a draft of a new international science report says.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday sent governments a final draft of its synthesis report, which combines three earlier, gigantic documents by the Nobel Prize-winning group. There is little in the report that wasn't in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to connect the different scientific disciplines studying problems caused by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas.