Air Force ground controllers last year successfully rescued a $1.7 billion military communications satellite that had been stranded in the wrong orbit and at risk of blowing up, possibly because some cloth had been left in a fuel line during manufacture.

Crews used backup propulsion systems to coax the satellite more than 21,000 miles (33,800 kilometers) higher. It took 14 months as the satellite battled gravity and dodged space junk. It finally arrived at its planned orbit last October.

A unique thermo solar power station in southern Spain can shrug off cloudy days: energy stored when the sun shines lets it produce electricity even during the night.

The Gemasolar station, up and running since last May, stands out in the plains of Andalusia.

Neutrinos do not go faster than light, according to fresh measurements of a test last year that had suggested the particles broke the Universe's speed limit, CERN said on Friday.

Judea Pearl, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, has been awarded the prestigious 2011 A.M. Turing Award.

Pearl, 75, was being honored for "innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines," the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) said.

A panel of experts on Thursday considered a proposal to repatriate Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's three-mast ship Maud from the Canadian Arctic.

A Norwegian group asked the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board to revisit a decision in December denying an export permit for the ship, after residents of Cambridge Bay, Canada opposed losing a treasured artifact that has become a tourist attraction in the far north.

The number of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped 28 percent this year, according to a report released Thursday, a decline some experts attribute to droughts in parts of the United States and Canada where the butterflies breed and begin their long migration south.

Others say damage to wintering grounds in central Mexico's mountains remains a factor in the decline, citing deforestation of the fir and pine forests they favor.

National Zoo officials say two rare Guam rail chicks have hatched there. The birds are extinct in the wild.

The small, flightless birds hatched March 3 and 4. The total population of the birds is now 162.

Frustrated male fruit flies, whose sexual advances are rejected by females, turn to alcohol to drown their sorrows, a study published Thursday revealed.

Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco discovered that rejected male flies have a tiny neuropeptide F molecule in their brain that pushes them to drink far more than their sexually satisfied counterparts.

Researchers say they have discovered the fossils of a small camel with a long snout that roamed the tropical rainforests of the isthmus of Panama some 20 million years ago.

The ancient camel had no hump, and one of the two species found appeared to stand only about two feet (.6 meters) tall, scientists reported in a recently published article in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Conventional wisdom holds that during the Mesozoic Era, mammals were small creatures that held on at life's edges, but now scientists say at least one mammal group flourished.

Rodent-like creatures called multituberculates appeared during the last 20 million years of the dinosaurs' reign and survived after dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago.