A Russian cosmonaut and two astronauts from the International Space Station touched down early Monday on the steppes of Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz capsule after spending over four months aboard the ISS.

Russia's Yury Malenchenko, Sunita Williams of the U.S. and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan touched down as scheduled just before 0200 GMT, the Russian Space Flight Control Center announced as the message "Landing Accomplished" was flashed on a giant screen.

The population of Uganda's mountain gorillas has grown to 400, up from 302 in 2006, according to a census conducted last year, bringing the total number of mountain gorillas in Africa to 880 and giving hope to conservationists trying to save the critically endangered species.

Uganda is now home to nearly half of the world's mountain gorillas remaining in the wild, a source of confidence for a country that has come to depend heavily on the popular apes for substantial tourism revenue. The rest of the surviving mountain gorillas — the species Gorilla beringei beringei — are in Congo and Rwanda.

Astronomers using a complex system of super telescopes have caught a glimpse of what is likely the most distant, and thus oldest, galaxy ever seen -- some 13.3 billion light years from Earth.

The star cluster was observed in its infancy -- as it looked when the Universe was just three percent of its present age, NASA and the European Space Agency announced.

Could pigs be an unexpected source for transmitting the deadly Ebola virus?

That is the question raised by a Canadian lab study, which says six piglets deliberately infected with Ebola passed the virus on to macaque monkeys housed in wire cages inside their pig pen.

New advances in hearing aids and medical imaging may be possible thanks to a tiny insect from the South American jungle, according to a study released Thursday.

The South American bush cricket, also called the katydid, has some of the smallest ears of any creature on the planet.

Freestyle rap, an improvised style of the music genre associated with back-to-front baseball caps, baggy jeans and gold chains, has burst onto the science stage, shedding light on the workings of the brain.

Researchers at the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in the United States have examined freestyle rappers' brains to see which areas light up during the creative phase.

Australia Friday created the world's largest network of marine reserves, protecting a huge swathe of ocean environment despite claims it will devastate the fishing industry.

The announcement, after years of planning and consultation, will significantly expand the protection of creatures such as the blue whale, green turtle, critically endangered populations of grey nurse sharks, and dugongs.

Brazilian researchers are turning to cloning to help fight the perilous decline of several animal species.

The scientists at Brazil's Embrapa agriculture research agency said this week they have spent two years building a gene library with hundreds of samples from eight native species, including the collared anteater, the bush dog, the black lion tamarin, the coati, and deer and bison varieties, as well as the leopard and the maned wolf.

A scientific method used in a landmark U.N. report that said warming was intensifying global drought is badly flawed, a study published on Wednesday said.

Contrary to what the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggested in 2007, there is little evidence that global droughts have become longer or more extreme in recent decades, it said.

Scientists have identified a new gene variant that seems to strongly raise the risk for Alzheimer's disease, giving a fresh target for research into treatments for the mind-robbing disorder.

The problem gene is not common — less than 1 percent of people are thought to have it — but it roughly triples the chances of developing Alzheimer's compared to people with the normal version of the gene. It also seems to harm memory and thinking in older people without dementia.