Renewables like solar and wind represent the fastest-growing source of energy power generation and will make up a quarter of the global power mix by 2018, the International Energy Agency said in a report Wednesday.

The IEA said that in 2016 renewable energy will overtake natural gas as a power source and will be twice that of nuclear, and second only to coal as a source of power.

The world's first space conversation experiment between a robot and humans is ready to be launched.

Developers from the Kirobo project, named after "kibo" or hope in Japanese and "robot," gathered in Tokyo Wednesday to demonstrate the humanoid robot's ability to talk.

A new species of bird with a distinctive orange-red coloured tuft of feathers on its head has been found in Cambodia's populous capital city, conservationists said on Wednesday.

The remarkable discovery of the Cambodian tailorbird, or orthotomus chaktomuk, in Phnom Penh -- and several other locations including a construction site just outside of the city of 1.5 million people -- has astounded conservationists.

China completed its longest manned space mission Wednesday as its Shenzhou-10 spacecraft and three crew members safely returned to Earth, in a major step for Beijing's goal of building a permanent space station by 2020.

The return capsule touched down at 8:07 am (0007 GMT), live state TV footage showed, kicking up a cloud of dust on the grasslands of north China's Inner Mongolia region.

Three "super Earth" planets have been found orbiting a nearby star at a distance where life in theory could exist, according to a record-breaking tally announced on Tuesday by the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The three are part of a cluster of as many as seven planets that circle Gliese 667C, one of three stars located a relatively close 22 light years from Earth in the constellation of Scorpio, it said.

China's Shenzhou-10 spacecraft has completed a challenging mission to manually dock with a space module and its three astronauts are expected to return to earth on Wednesday, state media said Tuesday.

The astronauts have completed their mission after docking twice with the Tiangong-1 space module, where they conducted medical experiments and delivered a lecture to schoolchildren, China's official Xinhua news agency said.

New evidence that fracking may contaminate drinking water was published Monday in a study sure to add fuel to the fight over the controversial method of extracting natural gas from cracks in rocks.

Researchers at Duke University analyzed 141 drinking water samples from private water wells across the gas-rich Marcellus shale basin in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Two space station astronauts took care of a little outside maintenance Monday.

Russian flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin replaced a main valve on the International Space Station and prepared for the arrival of a new lab later this year.

Climate change is creating more frequent and more unpredictable extreme weather events, forcing insurers to change how they assess the risk of natural disasters hitting a specific area, the Geneva Association think tank said Monday.

"Traditional approaches, which are solely based on analyzing historical data, increasingly fail to estimate today's hazard probabilities," the think tank for strategically important insurance and risk management issues, warned in a report.

Higher levels of air pollution reduced the frequency of North Atlantic hurricanes and other tropical storms for most of the 20th century, a study said Sunday.

Adding to evidence for mankind's impact on the weather system, the probe found a link between these powerful storms and aerosols, the scientific term for specks of matter suspended in a gas.