Astonished astronomers said Wednesday they had found rings around an asteroid, the smallest object known to have this feature and only the fifth after Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

The twin rings around a rock called Chariklo were spotted in June last year as it passed in front of a star, scrutinised by seven telescopes dotted over a 1,500-kilometer (930-mile) stretch of South America.

In a blind taste test, eight out of eight pandas agree -- sugar is delicious.

In a new study out Wednesday, scientists put the panda taste receptors to the test, wondering whether the cuddly critters would even notice the difference between plain water and the sweet stuff.

Australia on Thursday rejected a plan to let big-game hunters shoot crocodiles in the country's tropical north, saying such a scheme risked encouraging "cruel" behavior.

Under the proposal about 50 crocodile safaris a year would be allowed in the Northern Territory, where the giant reptiles have become increasingly common since they were declared a protected species in 1971.

Lights will go off in some 7,000 cities around the world for this weekend's Earth Hour event, which will aim to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for environmental projects worldwide, organizers said Thursday.

Organizers WWF have partnered with payments giant PayPal to allow donors to contribute for specific projects in countries from Russia and India to Canada and Indonesia, using Asian fundraising site Crowdonomic.

Searchers racing to find flight MH370's "black box" face daunting hurdles ranging from undersea volcanoes to mountainous seas as they operate in one of Earth's most remote locations, experts said Wednesday.

They warned there was no guarantee that an unprecedented international search operation involving the militaries of six nations would succeed in retrieving wreckage of the doomed Malaysian Airlines plane which disappeared on March 8 with 239 people on board.

The snowpack atop mountain peaks in California and Colorado has a new set of eyes watching from high above to better gauge the amount of water that will rumble down rivers and streams each spring as runoff.

In a new mission, NASA fixed a lumbering twin-engine plane with high-tech equipment to make regular snow surveys, starting last weekend in drought-stricken California before the weather front expected to bring snow to the Sierra this week. At an altitude of up to 20,000 feet, the so-called Airborne Snow Observatory measures snowpack's depth and water content with precision.

Scientists have built Mars here on Earth -- at least within the walls of a simulation chamber that mimics conditions on the Red Planet down to its Martian dust, according to a paper out Tuesday.

The Spanish researchers built a vacuum chamber to reproduce conditions including temperature, pressure, gas composition and radiation on Mars, to help test gear designed for missions to the fourth planet from the sun.

An engine snag has delayed the arrival of a Russian spacecraft carrying three astronauts to the International Space Station until Thursday.

A rocket carrying Russians Alexander Skvortsov and Oleg Artemyev and American Steve Swanson to the International Space Station blasted off successfully early Wednesday from the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

It was put on auction as a camera that made it to the moon and back. And it had its price — nearly $760,000.

The Hasselblad 500 sold over the weekend is described by Vienna auctioneers Galerie Westlicht as part of the equipment carried by the 1971 Apollo 15 mission, the fourth manned mission to land on the moon. Galerie Westlicht identifies the new owner as Japanese businessman Terukazu Fujisawa.

Cars drive past a traffic board reading "Warning air pollution 90 km /h recommended" near Rennes, western France on March 15, 2014

French prosecutors have opened a preliminary probe after an environmental group filed a criminal complaint over this month's spike in air pollution, a judicial source said Monday.