Scientists on Tuesday said they had found a gene in wild tomatoes that enables farmed tomato plants to be grown 24 hours a day under natural and artificial light, boosting yields by up to 20 percent.

Back in the 1920s, experiments showed that modern tomato plants suffer potentially fatal damage to their leaves when grown under continuous light.

Scientists using a high-powered telescope in Chile have been able to measure Pluto's orbit precisely, to help with navigation as a U.S. probe nears the planet in 2015. 

This will help NASA's New Horizons craft home in on its target, according to scientists at the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory, adding that the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile had made it all possible.

The forerunner of dinosaurs like three-horned Triceratops was a bird-hipped creature the size of a turkey that lived in herds in South America and liked to munch on ferns, scientists said Wednesday.

Laquintasaura venezuelae, named after the country in which it was discovered, lived 201 million years ago in the earliest Jurassic period, soon after a major extinction at the end of the Triassic, said a paper in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The space probe Rosetta on Wednesday made a historic rendezvous with a comet, climaxing a 10-year, six-billion-kilometer (3.7-billion-mile) chase through the Solar System, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

"We're at the comet," Rosetta's flight operations manager, Sylvain Lodiot, declared in a webcast from mission control in Darmstadt, Germany.

Twelve Chinese fishermen were handed long prison terms on Tuesday for illegal fishing in the Philippines after their ship ran aground on a World Heritage-listed coral reef, a court official said.

The 12 were arrested at the Tubbataha Reef, a marine sanctuary in the western Philippines famed as a pristine dive spot, in April last year after their 48-meter (157-foot) boat hit and badly damaged it.

SpaceX will build the world's first commercial site for orbital rocket launches in the southernmost tip of Texas.

The state of Texas added $15.3 million in incentives to the geographic value of a location east of Brownsville that will allow SpaceX to have greater control over the timing of its launches. The company has said it plans to launch 12 rockets a year from the Boca Chica Beach, a short walk from the Gulf of Mexico and just a couple miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

A renowned Japanese stem cell scientist who co-wrote research that was later retracted in an embarrassing scandal has been found dead of an apparent suicide, police said Tuesday.

The body of Yoshiki Sasai, 52, was discovered hanging inside the stairwell of a building that houses the Riken Center for Developmental Biology, one of the country's most prestigious scientific research institutions.

As murky water snakes through a man-made wetland between Dallas and Houston, its shallow ponds of lush vegetation slowly filter out phosphorous and nitrates until, a week later, the water runs clear as a creek into the area drinking supply.

The 2,000-acre wetland system in Fairfield converts what is mainly treated wastewater that would otherwise flow into the Gulf of Mexico into an additional 65,000 gallons per day feeding the Richland-Chambers Reservoir — a significant contribution in a state enduring prolonged drought.

Nigeria and Shell have done almost nothing to ease oil pollution in the Ogoniland area of the Niger Delta, three years after a landmark U.N. report called for a $1 billion dollar clean-up, Amnesty International said Monday.

Environmental devastation in Ogoniland has for many come to symbolise the tragedy of Nigeria's vast oil wealth.

When a private sports club in an upmarket Dhaka neighborhood "grabbed" a children's park for development this year, it sparked a wave of enraged protests rarely seen in impoverished Bangladesh.

Hundreds of parents, former national sports stars and environmental activists staged sit-ins for days, demanding the club hand back the park -- a green oasis for residents in one of the world's most densely populated and polluted cities.