An excited crowd gathered in southwestern Romania to watch more than a dozen woolly brown bison stroll off lorries into the picturesque Tarcu mountains -- nearly 200 years after they became extinct in the region.

"I grew up hearing legends about bison that lived here and today we finally see them there," said 60-year-old teacher Elena Dragomir, watching the event near the village of Armenis with a group of her students.

The pilot of a solar-powered plane trapped in Japan by the country's rainy season said Thursday he is prepared to wait two more months for a weather window, but may eventually have to give up for the year.

Andre Borschberg, who piloted the record-breaking Solar Impulse 2 from Nanjing, China to the central Japanese city of Nagoya, said if the plane's round-the-world trip was not finished in the summer, it would have to wait until next year.

NASA said Wednesday an international satellite studying the world's oceans has stopped working after four years.

The space agency said that the Argentine-built satellite ceased operations last week after a hardware failure.

EU lawmakers on Wednesday backed a ban on cloning farm animals and products derived from them, citing deep public unease at the prospect they could make it onto supermarket shelves.

The European Parliament's environment and agriculture committees said proposals submitted by the European Commission had to be stronger to meet concerns over cloning and 'franken-foods' in the 28-nation bloc.

A tiger that escaped from Tbilisi zoo in a freak flood mauled a man to death in the Georgian capital on Wednesday before being gunned down by police, officials said.

The interior ministry had initially said the animal was a lion and deployed special forces to hunt down the beast which had been on the loose since the weekend flooding that killed at least 17 people.

An elephant killed a 28-year-old Thai man and injured his colleague as they were eating dinner at a beachside restaurant in eastern Thailand, police said on Wednesday.

The local telecoms employee died in hospital after the elephant gored his chest with its tusk as he ate hotpot with a fellow worker in the coastal city of Rayong late Monday.

Cleaner air worldwide would save two million lives a year and not only in the most polluted countries, a study released Tuesday found.

"We were surprised to find the importance of cleaning air not just in the dirtiest parts of the world -- which we expected to find -- but also in cleaner environments like the U.S., Canada and Europe," co-author Julian Marshall of the University of Minnesota said in the study published by Environmental Science & Technology.

Question: When is a Minute Not a Minute?

The answer: At 2359 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) on June 30, when the world will experience a minute that will last 61 seconds.

A devastating earthquake that hit Nepal in April moved Mount Everest three centimeters (just over an inch) to the southwest, but did not change its height, according to Chinese research published on Tuesday.

The 7.8-magnitude quake reversed the gradual northeasterly course of the world's highest peak, which straddles Nepal and China, the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation found.

An ambitious attempt to circumnavigate the globe in a solar-powered plane is facing a "moment of truth" after two weeks of bad weather that have left it stuck in Japan, its pilot said Tuesday.

With frustration starting to build a fortnight after Solar Impulse 2 made an impromptu landing in Nagoya, it was vital to keep a cool head about the best time to begin the next leg to Hawaii, Andre Borschberg told Agence France Presse.