Astronomers have discovered the largest planet outside our solar system orbiting two stars, at a distance that would make it potentially habitable for people, scientists announced Monday.

SpaceX chief Elon Musk shed light Saturday on his new plan to send an unmanned spaceship to Mars as early as 2018, as part of his quest to some day colonize the Red Planet.

Musk, the Internet entrepreneur who cofounded of PayPal and currently also runs Tesla Motors, earlier this year announced on Twitter that he was "Planning to send Dragon to Mars as soon as 2018." But there was little in the way of details at the time.

The Swiss pilot readying to cross the Atlantic in a solar-powered plane on the next leg of a record-breaking, round-the-world mission says he is making science fiction reality.

Bertrand Piccard, a psychiatrist and balloonist, will next command Solar Impulse 2 when meteorologists determine the best five-to-six day window for the ocean crossing from New York to either Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal or Morocco, depending on the wind and the weather.

Four new elements have been added to the periodic table after discoveries by Japanese, Russian and U.S. scientists, an international authority said, with the new substances including Asia's first entry on the chart.

Mexican engineer Gabriel Luna-Sandoval was urinating one day when he realized that the yellow liquid could be of "vital" use elsewhere.

Nine years later, he invented a machine that he said can transform urine into a biogas to serve as a household heater to take hot showers or cook.

It was a startling scientific finding: Children who eat candy tend to weigh less than those who don't.

Less startling was how it came about. The paper was funded by a trade association representing the makers of Butterfingers, Hershey and Skittles. And its findings were touted by the group even though one of its authors didn't seem to think much of it.

The US government, in a first, is preparing to approve a private commercial space mission beyond the Earth's orbit, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

Europe's trailblazing spacecraft Rosetta has resumed its exploration of a comet hurtling through the Solar System after a "dramatic weekend" in which contact with Earth was lost for nearly 24 hours, mission control said Thursday.

Hugh Herr, an MIT professor who has devoted his life to creating bionic limbs since he had both his legs amputated after a climbing accident, was awarded Spain's top science prize Wednesday.

Falling energy costs, including from the rise of renewables, are making the controversial expansion of Hungary's sole nuclear plant with Russian reactors less viable, one of the country's energy chiefs said Monday.

"Due to the development of renewable resources, we can see clearly that the price of energy will fall in the future," said the chief executive of Hungary's national electricity company MVM, Peter Csiba, in an interview in the leading Hungarian daily Nepszabadsag.