Researchers Thursday unveiled a powerful new postage-stamp size chip delivering supercomputer performance using a process that mimics the human brain.

The Audubon Society wants bird lovers to contribute research to a project scientists hope will help save Atlantic puffins from starvation in Maine.

There are about 1,000 pairs of the seabirds, known for their multi-colored beaks and clownish appearance, in Maine. Audubon says the number of puffin fledging chicks has declined in the last two years, possibly because their key food source, herring and hake, are leaving for cooler waters. Puffins are on the state's threatened species list.

Levels of the metal mercury in much of the world's oceans are double to triple what they were before the industrial revolution, a new study says.

Researchers found there's more mercury from human sources — mostly burning fossil fuels and mining for gold — than scientists had thought.

Scientists on Tuesday said they had found a gene in wild tomatoes that enables farmed tomato plants to be grown 24 hours a day under natural and artificial light, boosting yields by up to 20 percent.

Back in the 1920s, experiments showed that modern tomato plants suffer potentially fatal damage to their leaves when grown under continuous light.

Scientists using a high-powered telescope in Chile have been able to measure Pluto's orbit precisely, to help with navigation as a U.S. probe nears the planet in 2015. 

This will help NASA's New Horizons craft home in on its target, according to scientists at the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory, adding that the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile had made it all possible.

The forerunner of dinosaurs like three-horned Triceratops was a bird-hipped creature the size of a turkey that lived in herds in South America and liked to munch on ferns, scientists said Wednesday.

Laquintasaura venezuelae, named after the country in which it was discovered, lived 201 million years ago in the earliest Jurassic period, soon after a major extinction at the end of the Triassic, said a paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The space probe Rosetta on Wednesday made a historic rendezvous with a comet, climaxing a 10-year, six-billion-kilometer (3.7-billion-mile) chase through the Solar System, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

"We're at the comet," Rosetta's flight operations manager, Sylvain Lodiot, declared in a webcast from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.

Twelve Chinese fishermen were handed long prison terms on Tuesday for illegal fishing in the Philippines after their ship ran aground on a World Heritage-listed coral reef, a court official said.

The 12 were arrested at the Tubbataha Reef, a marine sanctuary in the western Philippines famed as a pristine dive spot, in April last year after their 48-meter (157-foot) boat hit and badly damaged it.

SpaceX will build the world's first commercial site for orbital rocket launches in the southernmost tip of Texas.

The state of Texas added $15.3 million in incentives to the geographic value of a location east of Brownsville that will allow SpaceX to have greater control over the timing of its launches. The company has said it plans to launch 12 rockets a year from the Boca Chica Beach, a short walk from the Gulf of Mexico and just a couple miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

A renowned Japanese stem cell scientist who co-wrote research that was later retracted in an embarrassing scandal has been found dead of an apparent suicide, police said Tuesday.

The body of Yoshiki Sasai, 52, was discovered hanging inside the stairwell of a building that houses the Riken Center for Developmental Biology, one of the country's most prestigious scientific research institutions.