Tim Peake, the first Briton to travel to the International Space Station, blasted off on Tuesday from the Baikonur cosmodrome with Russian space veteran Yury Malenchenko and Tim Kopra of NASA for a six-month mission.

Fire from the boosters of the Soyuz TMA-19M rocket cut a bright light through the overcast sky at the Russia-operated cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, after the spacecraft launched on schedule at 1103 GMT (17.03 pm local time), according to live television broadcasts.

A Cyprus lawmaker has stirred controversy online after posting a picture of himself at a table serving a dish of songbirds whose poaching is banned on the Mediterranean island.

Evgenios Hamboullas -- a member of the environment committee in the house of representatives -- uploaded the image to Facebook on Saturday with the catchline: "Soon in our restaurants! Happy Holidays!"

A Japanese space probe successfully entered "target orbit" and is on its way to rendezvousing with a far away asteroid, in a quest to study the origin of the solar system, authorities said Monday.

Earlier this month the unmanned explorer, Hayabusa 2, passed by Earth to harness the planet's gravitational pull in a bid to switch its orbital path to continue toward tiny Ryugu asteroid.

Three astronauts from the United States, Russia and Japan on Friday successfully completed a rare nighttime landing on Earth in the wintry Kazakh steppe after returning from the International Space Station.

"They have landed safely and the recovery team have found them. Everything is according to plan," a spokesman for Russian space agency Roscosmos told AFP.

Scientists have invented a machine that imitates the way the human brain learns new information, a step forward for artificial intelligence, researchers reported Thursday.

The system described in the journal Science is a computer model "that captures humans' unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example," the study said.

A conservation group slammed Japan Thursday for fueling illegal ivory trading and smuggling through poor law enforcement.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) ran an undercover probe that found traders in Japan were willing to dodge rules on ivory sales to move it across borders, including to major market China where elephant tusks are highly prized.

A monkey-eating eagle has been hatched in captivity in the Philippines, boosting the critically-endangered giant bird's fight against extinction.

Found only in the rapidly vanishing tropical rainforests of the Philippines, the meter- (3.3-foot) long raptor gets its name from its diet of macaque monkeys and other small animals that share its habitat in Mindanao, the country's main southern island.

The first litter of puppies conceived through in vitro fertilization has been born, in a scientific breakthrough decades in the making, U.S. researchers announced Wednesday.

A female dog into which 19 embryos were transferred gave birth in July to seven healthy puppies, according to the researchers from Cornell University.

Japan's space agency said Wednesday its "Akatsuki" probe had successfully entered into orbit around Venus after an initial attempt at reaching the second planet from the sun failed five years ago.

The success marks the first time a Japanese space probe has entered into the orbit of another planet, according to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Russia has lost communication with a newly developed military satellite after it apparently failed to separate from the booster rocket after its launch, a source in the country's air and space forces told TASS state news agency on Monday. 

"The spacecraft... is recognized as lost since it is impossible to use it according to its purpose," the source said, adding that a repeat attempt to separate the satellite from the upper-stage rocket was unsuccessful.