The U.S. space agency's powerful deep-space rocket, known as the Space Launch System (SLS), aims to blast off for the first time in 2018, NASA said Wednesday.

The SLS has been in development for three years already, and when finished it should propel spacecraft beyond Earth's orbit and eventually launch crew vehicles to Mars by the 2030s.

A lab sited under 1.4 kilometers (4,500 feet) of rock has detected particles from the Sun that help to measure activity at the very heart of our star, scientists said Wednesday.

Deep beneath Italy's Apennine Mountains, the laboratory recorded low-energy neutrinos spewed out by the fusion of hydrogen protons, the mechanism by which the Sun's core generates energy, they said.

Biologists on Wednesday said the genetic machinery of humans, fruit flies and roundworms was similar in many surprising ways, a discovery that could help basic research into disease.

A consortium of more than 200 scientists compared the genome of modern man with that of two creatures widely studied in the lab -- the fruitfly (Drosophila melanogaster) and a tiny creature called roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans).

Police in Brazil have broken up an Amazon deforestation gang considered the worst currently active, officials said Wednesday.

The gang would invade public land in northern Para state, burn down forest, divided the land into parcels and sell them, federal police said in a statement.

Global warming is here, human-caused and probably already dangerous — and it's increasingly likely that the heating trend could be irreversible, a draft of a new international science report says.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday sent governments a final draft of its synthesis report, which combines three earlier, gigantic documents by the Nobel Prize-winning group. There is little in the report that wasn't in the other more-detailed versions, but the language is more stark and the report attempts to connect the different scientific disciplines studying problems caused by the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and gas.

Three tortoises wearing iPads for a controversial art exhibit have been removed at a veterinarian's request because of wet and cool weather in Aspen, Colorado.

The tortoises at the Aspen Art Museum were taken to an undisclosed conservation site on Monday, less than three weeks after the exhibit opened. The Aspen Art Museum says the conservation site will be the permanent home for the African sulcata tortoises.

It's a dry winter day in southeast Brazil, but a steamy tropical summer reigns inside the labs at Oxitec, where workers are making an unusual product: genetically modified mosquitoes to fight dengue fever.

The British biotech firm has altered the DNA of the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent it from spreading the potentially deadly virus, which has hit Brazil harder than any other country this year.

Scientists are monitoring lava flowing from a Hawaii volcano eruption that could threaten homes.

The June 27 lava flow, named for the date it began erupting from a new vent, isn't an immediate threat to homes or structures downhill of the flow, but could become one in weeks or months if it continues to advance, the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said. The Kilauea volcano has been continuously erupting since 1983, but new vents — or points where lava reaches the surface — have opened up periodically.

Factfile on the European global navigation system GalileoView Photo

Factfile on the European global navigation system Galileo

A three-million-year-old child's skull uncovered in South Africa has no signs of the kind of soft spot that would be seen in human children with larger brains, a study said Monday.

The findings are the latest contribution to long-running debate over whether the Taung Child fossil may have represented the earliest signs of a fusing skull.