China is to build two extra research stations in Antarctica, where it currently has three facilities, the State Oceanic Administration confirmed on Friday.

A summer base, to be used between December and March, will be built between two of its existing stations -- Kunlun and Zhongshan -- on the frozen continent, the official Xinhua news agency said.

They appear in the desert in southwest Africa and persist for decades: so-called fairy circles, or puzzling rings of grass with a barren center.

Now a new study, published Thursday in the U.S. journal "Science," purports to end the enigma and explain just what is going on: it's the work of termites.

A groundbreaking solar-powered Swiss aircraft is ready to make a coast-to-coast flight across the United States, its creators said Thursday.

The experimental Solar Impulse plane, which has made several trips since its maiden flight in 2009, will take off on May 1 on a transcontinental tour split in five stages.

A new Russian-American crew arrived at the International Space Station (ISS) on Friday after an express trip from Earth of under six hours, the fastest ever journey to the orbiting laboratory.

A NASA astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts opened the hatches of their Soyuz-TMA spaceship and floated into the ISS to a warm welcome from the three incumbent crew, live pictures broadcast on Russian television showed.

Physicists announced further proof Wednesday for a theory that mysterious particles called neutrinos which go "missing" on the journey from the Sun to Earth are in fact shape-shifting along the way, arriving undetected.

The evidence: a muon-type neutrino dispatched from the CERN research laboratory near Geneva had arrived as a tau neutrino at the INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory in Italy, 730 kilometers (450 miles) away, they said in a statement.

U.S. environmental regulators are under fire from beekeepers and conservationists who say they are failing to vet risky pesticides that put people and valuable crop pollinators like bees in peril.

On Wednesday, the Natural Resources Defense Council issued a scathing report of the Environmental Protection Agency's record of using a loophole to allow more than 10,000 "untested or under-tested" pesticides on the market.

British scientists have developed a "holy grail" vaccine for foot-and-mouth disease that is safer and more resilient than current vaccines, according to an article published in journal PLOS pathogens Wednesday.

At the moment, animals are given a small dose of live infectious virus to stimulate the body's immune system into producing antibodies that recognize and destroy the pathogen whenever it appears in the bloodstream.

Millions of people in northern Europe are still battling snow and ice, wondering why they are being punished with bitter cold when -- officially -- spring has arrived and Earth is in the grip of global warming.

Yet some scientists, eyeing the fourth year in a row of exceptionally harsh late-winter weather in parts of Europe and North America, suggest warming is precisely the problem.

Teresita Mabignay does her ironing using free electricity on the slope of a garbage dump, an unlikely beneficiary of efforts to turn the Philippines' growing rubbish problems into a clean-energy windfall.

Mabignay lives at the base of one of Manila's largest landfills, which was the first in the country to have its methane gas converted into power as part of a United Nations' program aimed at tackling climate change.

The message emblazoned on a billboard outside the Peruvian capital sounds almost too good to be true: drinkable water for anyone who wants some in this arid village.

Even more intriguingly, the fresh, pure water on offer along a busy road in this dusty town some 90 kilometers (55 miles) south of Lima, has been extracted, as if by magic, from the humid air.