Astronomers call them super-Earths, and they are abundant outside our solar system. But the more experts learn about them, the weirder our own planet seems in comparison.

Planets the size of Earth and up to four times larger are believed to make up about three-quarters of the planet candidates discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft.

U.S. company SpaceX said Monday it had deployed a commercial Thai satellite, in its second successful launch in weeks.

The private firm's two-stage Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 2206 GMT, carrying with it the Thaicom 6 telecommunications satellite.

China crushed a pile of ivory reportedly weighing over six tonnes on Monday, in a landmark event aimed at shedding its image as a global hub for the illegal trade in African elephant tusks.

Clouds of dust emerged as masked workers fed tusks into crushing machines in what was described as the first ever public destruction of ivory in China.

India on Sunday successfully launched its first rocket using domestically produced booster technology after several previous missions had failed, taking another step forward in its ambitious space program.

The Indian-made cryogenically-powered rocket blasted off from the southern spaceport of Sriharikota as scheduled, as Delhi tries to join an elite club of countries which have mastered the complex technology.

Geologists on Sunday reported insights into super-volcanoes, the brooding, enigmatic giants of Earth's crust whose eruptions are as catastrophic as they are rare.

The buoyancy of molten rock, or magma, is the key explanation as to why these monsters blow their stack, according to the report in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Kennedy Space Center will be the testing site for a top-secret Air Force space plane.

Boeing is working on the spacecraft, and the company announced Friday that it will convert a former space shuttle building for the X-37B orbital test vehicle program.

The first Taiwan-born giant panda cub was unveiled to the media on Saturday in a warm up for her highly-anticipated public debut next week.

Yuan Zai agilely climbed up and down for most of her 30-minute media preview inside an exhibition enclosure, as mother Yuan Yuan sat lazily aside munching bamboos.

A Chinese icebreaker that went to the aid of a Russian ship stuck in heavy floes in Antarctica has now itself become trapped by ice, officials said Saturday, amid anger about the impact of the rescue on research.

The Xue Long, which on Thursday used its helicopter to ferry dozens of passengers on the stranded Russian ship Akademik Shokalskiy to the safety of an Australian vessel, has been unable to free itself.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture opened the door Friday to commercial sales of corn and soybean seeds genetically engineered to resist the weed killer 2,4-D, which is best known as an ingredient in the Vietnam War-era herbicide Agent Orange.

The U.S. military stopped using Agent Orange in 1971, and it has not been produced since the 1970s. Scientists don't believe 2,4-D, which is legal and commonly used by gardeners and some farmers, was responsible for the health problems linked to Agent Orange.

A wall-crawling robot inspired by the gecko has taken a small but important step towards a future in space, scientists said on Thursday.

The tiny legged prototype could be the forerunner of automatons which crawl along the hulls of spacecraft, cleaning and maintaining them, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.