Discovery on Thursday will become the first spaceship of the retired U.S. shuttle fleet to enter its permanent home as a museum artifact, marking a solemn end to the 30-year U.S. space flight program.

A team of about 20 veteran astronauts who flew to space aboard Discovery will surround the celebrated spacecraft and escort it to a branch of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum outside the U.S. capital.

A University of California San Diego scientist was able to use his math and physics knowledge to argue his way out of a $400 traffic ticket.

In a paper titled "The Proof of Innocence," senior research scientist Dmitri Krioukov successfully appealed his failure-to-stop ticket by explaining that he may have appeared to an officer that he didn't stop when he actually did, according to the Los Angeles Times .

The fact that land-bound dinosaurs laid eggs is what sealed their fate of mass extinction millions of years ago while live birthing mammals went on to thrive, scientists said Wednesday.

In a new explanation for mammals' evolutionary victory over dinosaurs, researchers said a mathematical model has shown that infant size was the clincher.

Scientists have discovered a new shrimp-like species in a gypsum cave in southeastern New Mexico, only a few dozen miles from the famous caves at Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

The species of amphipod was unknown before being discovered about a month ago in the Burton Flats area east of Carlsbad, said Jim Goodbar, the Bureau of Land Management's senior cave specialist. The agency announced the discovery Tuesday.

A university in Russia's Chechnya claimed on Tuesday to have found an unprecedented stash of giant fossilized dinosaur eggs in a remote mountainous area of the North Caucasus region.

The Chechen state university uploaded photos of the egg-shaped protrusions on a rock face discovered in the region's south on its website, calling them a "sensational find" and Russia's main channels showed the remote site Tuesday.

Two new species of frog have been discovered in fast-disappearing forests in the Philippines, boosting hopes for the survival of the country's rich but threatened wildlife, scientists said Tuesday.

The new discoveries are a mottled brown frog with red eyes and a broad yellow stripe running down its back, and a yellow-green one not much bigger than a human thumb, British-based Fauna and Flora International said.

French scientists said Monday they have found evidence proving the stereotype that people who sport tattoos and piercings are heavier drinkers.

Alcohol tests performed on nearly 2,000 young men and women frequenting bars in the west of France showed a strong correlation between body art and boozing, they said.

At daybreak Tuesday, the oldest of NASA's retired shuttle fleet will leave its home at Kennedy Space Center for the final time, riding on top a modified jumbo jet.

Its destination: the Smithsonian Institution's hangar outside Washington, D.C.

An international team of scientists said Sunday the largest brain study of its kind had found a gene linked to intelligence, a small piece in the puzzle as to why some people are smarter than others.

A variant of this gene "can tilt the scales in favor of a higher intelligence", study leader Paul Thompson told Agence France Presse, stressing though that genetic blessings were not the only factor in brainpower.

One of the world's biggest glacier regions has so far resisted global warming that has ravaged mountain ice elsewhere, scientists reported on Sunday.

For years, experts have debated the state of glaciers that smother nearly 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 sq. miles) of the Karakoram Range in the western Himalayas.