The earthquake that set off the tsunami which caused the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster was unleashed by a stealthy nine-year buildup of pressure on a plate boundary, scientists said Tuesday.

Part of a fault where two mighty plates on the Earth's crust collide east of Japan was being quietly crushed and twisted for nearly a decade, they said.

Earth has a few more near-twin planets outside our solar system, tantalizing possibilities in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Astronomers announced Tuesday that depending on definitions, they have confirmed three or four more planets that are about the same size as Earth and are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold "Goldilocks Zone" for liquid water to form.

China on Wednesday granted public interest groups more power to sue those that flout environmental protection laws, the country's highest court said, as Beijing steps up efforts to curb pollution that regularly chokes major cities.

Social groups that work to fight polluters judicially will gain special status and have court fees reduced, the Supreme People's Court said on its website.

A probe that made the first landing on a comet but fell silent when its battery ran down may revive with sunlight in March, France's space chief said Monday.

"The Philae saga is going to continue," Jean-Yves Le Gall, head of the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), told journalists in Paris, referring to the robot lab perched on the dusty iceball zipping through space.

A sun-powered plane was loaded onto a cargo carrier in Switzerland late Monday heading for the Middle East from where it will attempt a revolutionary round-the-world trip.

The air carrier transporting Solar Impulse 2 is due to leave early Tuesday for Abu Dhabi, from where the long-winged plane will begin its record-making bid in March with the aim of completing the trip by July.

A dozen dogs originally destined for dinner tables in South Korea arrived in the Washington area Monday to be adopted as pets.

They were the first of a total of 23 dogs being imported into the United States this week as part of a campaign to combat the eating of dog meat in East Asia.

SpaceX on Tuesday aborted its Falcon 9 rocket launch at the last minute, postponing a landmark bid to open a new era of recycling rockets by landing a key part on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

The year 2014 broke a series of heat records in France, Britain, Germany and Belgium, weather agencies reported Monday.

In France, "2014 was the hottest year since 1900," the Meteo-France weather agency said in a statement.

3D printing will revolutionize war and foreign policy, say experts, not only by making possible incredible new designs but by turning the defense industry -- and possibly the entire global economy -- on its head.

For many, 3D printing still looks like a gimmick, used for printing useless plastic figurines and not much else.

Thick mangroves have long protected Karachi, southern Pakistan's sprawling metropolis, from battering by the Arabian Sea, but pollution, badly managed irrigation and years of illegal logging have left this natural barrier in a parlous state.

Experts fear that loss of the natural barrier formed by the mangroves could put the city of nearly 20 million people at greater risk from violent storms and even tsunamis.