LOS ANGELES (AP) - A Seattle team has collected a $900,000 prize in a NASA-backed competition to develop the concept of an elevator to space _ an idea spurred by science fiction novels.

The team's robotic machine raced up more than 2,950 feet of cable dangling from a helicopter.

Powered by a ground-based laser pointed...

BEIJING (AP) - A Chinese scholar persecuted during the Cultural Revolution for smuggling a rare collection of mushrooms out of China before World War II was honored Saturday when the collection was returned more than 70 years later.

At a ceremony at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Cornell University President Dav...

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) - After two years of tough U.N. climate talks often pitting the world's rich against the poor, negotiators said Friday a new global agreement now rides on industrial nations pledging profound emissions cuts next month in Copenhagen.

Negotiators from industrial nations, including the United States, sai...

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Lower-than-feared sea temperatures this summer gave a break to fragile coral reefs across the Caribbean and the central Gulf of Mexico that were damaged in recent years, scientists said Thursday.

Unusually warm water in recent years has caused the animals that make up coral to expel the colorful alg...

GENEVA (AP) - A rare Panamanian tree frog, a rodent from Madagascar and two lizards found only in the Philippines are among over 17,000 species threatened with extinction, a leading environmental group said Tuesday.

The Rabb's fringe-limbed tree frog, only discovered four years ago, is one of 1,895 amphibian spec...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The nightly attacks by two man-eating lions terrified railway workers and brought construction to a halt in one of east Africa's most notorious onslaughts more than a hundred years ago. But the death toll, scientists now say, wasn't as high as previously thought.

Over nine months the two voracious h...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The snows of Kilimanjaro may soon be gone. The African mountain's white peak _ made famous by writer Ernest Hemingway _ is rapidly melting, researchers report.

Some 85 percent of the ice that made up the mountaintop glaciers in 1912 was gone by 2007, researchers led by paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thom...

CHICAGO (AP) - An international group of scientists has decoded the DNA of the domestic pig, research that may one day prove useful in finding new treatments for both pigs and people, and perhaps aid in efforts for a new swine flu vaccine for pigs.

Pigs and humans are similar in size and makeup, and swine are ofte...

BEIJING (AP) - Qian Xuesen, a rocket scientist known as the father of China's space technology program, died Saturday in Beijing, the official Xinhua News Agency said. He was 98.

Qian, also known as Tsien Hsue-shen, began his career in the U.S. and was regarded as one of the brightest minds in the new field of aer...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Two of three parachutes malfunctioned in the test flight of a prototype moon rocket earlier this week, causing major damage to the booster, NASA said Friday.

The problem caused the Ares I-X booster to slam into the Atlantic Ocean harder than expected. The booster was badly dented by the impact.

Miss...