Three astronauts landed in Kazakhstan on Thursday, safely returning to Earth after their flight back home was delayed for a month by a Russian rocket failure.

Russia's Anton Shkaplerov, Italy's Samantha Cristoforetti and Terry Virts of the United States landed on schedule on the steppes of Kazakhstan and appeared to be in good health.

A solar-powered plane that got stuck in Japan during an attempt to fly around the world is fixed and ready to go -- as soon as the weather gets better, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

Solar Impulse 2 was diverted to the central city of Nagoya on its way between China and Hawaii because of a developing cold front over the Pacific that could have made its record-breaking journey too difficult.

Miners in northwestern Canada have discovered ice age camel bones whose DNA is forcing scientists to redraw the family tree of the now-extinct species.

Grant Zazula, a paleontologist with the Yukon's Department of Tourism and Culture, said three fossils recovered from a gold mine in the Klondike in 2008 are the first western camel bones found in the territory or Alaska in decades.

An experimental solar sail is being called a success three weeks after its arrival in space.

The Planetary Society said Wednesday its test flight resulted in an almost full deployment of the sail — an estimated 90 percent to 95 percent of the 344-square feet (32 sq. meters) light and shiny surface — and has set the stage for a follow-up mission next year.

Scientists said Tuesday they have discovered what appear to be red blood cells and collagen fibres in dinosaur bones, a find that may boost prospects of prising organic remains from a much wider range of fossils.

Using molecular microscopy, a British team analysed eight bone fragments from dinosaurs that lived some 75 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period.

The orbiting International Space Station has shifted in position after an engine glitch on a docked spacecraft which is due to bring astronauts back to Earth this week, Russia said. 

The engines of the Soyuz spacecraft "switched on unscheduled which led to an insignificant change in the position of the ISS", Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, said in a statement on its website.

In a world first, a woman has given birth after surgeons implanted ovarian tissue that had been removed when she was a child, doctors reported Wednesday.

The girl was coming up for her fourteenth birthday when she was diagnosed with acute anaemia, needing powerful, ovary-damaging treatment.

A radical environmental group has agreed to pay $2.55 million to Japanese whalers for breaching a U.S. court injunction to stay clear of their vessels in the Antarctic Ocean.

The United States-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and former senior officials of the group last week agreed to pay the sum to resolve civil contempt charges against them in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, court documents showed.

NASA launched a giant balloon Monday carrying a kind of "flying saucer" that will test technologies for landing on Mars, but its outsized parachute only partly deployed.

The aircraft fitted with the largest parachute ever constructed -- after several days of weather-related delays -- was launched from a military base in Hawaii. 

A bird that was once one of the most abundant in Europe and Asia is being hunted to near extinction because of Chinese eating habits, according to a study published Tuesday.

The population of the yellow-breasted bunting has plunged by 90 percent since 1980, all but disappearing from eastern Europe, Japan and large parts of Russia, said the study, published in the Conservation Biology journal.