For months, even years, accommodation on the remote Faeroe Islands has been booked out by fans who don't want to miss an almost three-minute-long astronomical sensation. Now they just have to hope the clouds will blow away so they can fully experience Friday's brief total solar eclipse.

Scores of eclipse chasers and scientists have invaded the archipelago armed with telescopes, cameras and glasses for safe direct solar viewing ahead of the big event.

Three local politicians in China raised at least 11 endangered Siberian tigers, state media has reported, after one of the animals jumped to its death from a high-rise building

Three local politicians in China raised at least 11 endangered Siberian tigers, state media reported Thursday after one of the animals jumped to its death from a high-rise building.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman hopes that one day a special piece of clothing he has designed will let the deaf "hear" and allow wearers to sense what is happening online without looking at a computer.

Eagleman's so-called VEST, whose name comes from the futuristic-sounding "variable extra-sensory transducer," is a sleeveless top equipped with vibrating nodes that buzz information onto the wearer's back, essentially giving the wearer a new source of information.

A solar-powered airplane on a round-the-world journey has taken off from the northern Indian town of Varanasi and is headed for its next stop in Myanmar.

The fuel-free aircraft, called the Solar Impulse 2, is powered by more than 17,000 solar cells on its wings that recharge the plane's batteries, enabling it to fly during the day or night. The plane was expected to land in Mandalay in Myanmar later Thursday.

Die-hard eclipse junkies from around the world are expected to brave polar bears and frostbite in the Arctic on Friday to savor three minutes of total darkness when the moon totally blocks the sun.

The Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, located 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) from the North Pole, is along with the Faroe Islands the only place the total eclipse will be visible.

A pilot who is trying to make history by flying a solar-powered plane around the world launched an angry attack on Indian bureaucracy on Wednesday after a lengthy hold-up in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state.

Bertrand Piccard, the Swiss pilot of Solar Impulse 2, said the aircraft's take-off from Ahmedabad city in the western state of Gujarat was delayed by five days because of tedious paperwork.

Perched atop a volcano in Mexico, a new generation observatory capable of detecting exploding stars, black holes and solar flares will begin operating this week, scientists said Tuesday.

The gamma ray High-Altitude Water Cherenkov Observatory, built at an altitude of 4,100 meters in the central city of Puebla, will be the only one in the world with permanent, powerful capacity to detect electromagnetic radiation from the universe, said Alberto Carraminana Alonso, head of the Mexican National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics.

The Milky Way galaxy may be home to billions of planets orbiting their host stars in a "habitable zone" where life could theoretically exist, researchers said Wednesday.

NASA's Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009 to search for so-called "exoplanets" outside our own solar system, has already found thousands -- many of them in systems like our own with multiple planets orbiting a star.

A pair of solar eruptions over the weekend have unleashed a severe geomagnetic storm that could disrupt power and communications Tuesday on Earth, U.S. officials said.

The storm could grow into a G4 on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scale of one to five, with five being the worst.

Fifty years after Alexei Leonov carried out the first spacewalk he still vividly recalls the moment he emerged from the capsule to become the only human to have floated in the cosmos.

"I gently pulled myself out and kicked off from the vessel," former cosmonaut Leonov, now a sprightly 80-year-old working for a Moscow bank, told AFP.