More than 1,800 dried chameleons on their way to Asia have been seized in Burkina Faso, officials said Monday.

The chameleons -- which are protected in Burkina Faso -- were packed in boxes and had a combined weight of around 29 kilos (64 pounds). They were headed to countries like China and the Philippines, where some believe they have medicinal powers.

NASA briefly lost touch this weekend with an unmanned spacecraft on its way to a historic encounter with Pluto, but the U.S. space agency said Monday the glitch has been fixed.

The communications blackout on Saturday lasted nearly an hour and half, and perplexed scientists as they tried to figure out what had gone wrong aboard the New Horizons spacecraft nearly three billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from Earth.

Astronomers proposed a novel explanation Monday for the strange appearance of the comet carrying Europe's robot probe Philae through outer space: alien microscopic life.

Many of the frozen dust ball’s features, which include a black crust over lakes of ice, flat-bottomed craters and mega-boulders scattered on the surface, were "consistent" with the presence of microbes, they said.

Can an algorithm pass for an author? Can a robot rock the house? A series of contests at Dartmouth College is about to find out.

Dartmouth is seeking artificial intelligence algorithms that create "human-quality" short stories, sonnets and dance music sets that will be pitted against human-produced literature, poetry and music selections. The judges won't know which is which.

Russia's Progress M-28M cargo ship pictured on the launch pad shortly before …

An unmanned Russian cargo ship successfully docked with the International Space Station on Sunday following a string of failed attempts to resupply the orbital laboratory.

Groggy on their paws after waking from tranquilizers, lions have returned to Rwanda for the first time since the endangered animal was wiped out following the country's 1994 genocide.

Seven lions -- two males and five females -- were transported in a marathon 30-hour journey from South Africa - first by air, then the final stretch by road to Rwanda's eastern Akagera National Park.

Two lions cubs were on Sunday taken from a Gaza Strip refugee camp to Jordan, their former owner said, after their maintenance became too great a financial burden.

"We're very sad. The two lions were like children to us," Saadi Jamal said of the five-month old male and female big cats named Max and Mona.

A plane powered by the sun's rays landed in Hawaii Friday after a record-breaking five-day journey across the Pacific Ocean from Japan.

Pilot Andre Borschberg and his single-seat aircraft landed at Kalaeloa, a small airport outside Honolulu. His nearly 118-hour voyage from Nagoya broke the record for the world's longest nonstop solo flight, his team said. The late U.S. adventurer Steve Fossett set the previous record of 76 hours when he flew a specially-designed jet around the globe in 2006.

The United States and China want to increase cooperation in fighting wildlife trafficking and are working to end commercial ivory trading, a U.S. Cabinet secretary said Friday.

U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell met in Beijing with Vice Premier Wang Yang and Forestry Administration head Zhao Shucong. She said both officials expressed that the Chinese government intends to end ivory trade in China, the world's top market for illegal ivory.

An efficient solution to a historic drought, or an environmentally risky pact with the devil?

That's the question raised by California farmers who are irrigating their crops with waste water supplied by oil companies, in an arrangement slammed as dangerous by environmental campaigners.