A short, hairy "ape man" who tumbled into a pit in South Africa millions of years ago is back in the running as a candidate ancestor for humans, scientists said Friday.

A painstaking 13-year probe has "convincingly shown", they said, that the strange-looking creature named Little Foot lived some three million years ago -- almost a million years earlier than calculated by rival teams.

Veterinarians at the San Diego Zoo have performed an operation on a newborn gorilla that was delivered by cesarean section.

The zoo says the 4.6-pound (2 kilogram) female was born Wednesday but seemed to have breathing problems. On Friday morning, a team fixed a collapsed lung that probably occurred during delivery.

Paris authorities said Thursday they would make public transport free for three days to encourage drivers to leave their vehicles behind due to severe pollution caused by unusually warm weather.

The French capital has been under maximum pollution alert for several days, as have more than 30 departments in the country, and the air is expected to remain exceptionally unhealthy until the end of the weekend.

A Japanese research institute was likely to retract a study that promised a revolutionary way to create stem cells over claims its data was faulty, reports said Friday, dealing a huge blow to what was touted as a game-changing discovery.

The findings, published by Haruko Obokata along with other Japanese researchers and a U.S.-based scientist in the January edition of British journal Nature, outlined a relatively simple approach in the quest to grow transplant tissue in the lab.

World Cup organizers said Wednesday that an estimated 320 tons of solid waste which the June 12 to July 13 event is expected to generate will be sent for recycling.

The government World Cup web portal said organizers expect each match to generate around five tons of recyclable waste based on the experience of last year's Confederations Cup.

A hundred and fifty years ago, in "Journey to the Center of the Earth", French science-fiction forerunner Jules Verne pictured a vast sea that lay deep under our planet's surface.

Today, that strange and haunting image has found an unexpected echo in a scientific paper.

A pint-sized tyrannosaur braved the frigid Arctic and feasted on fellow dinosaurs 70 million years ago, according to a report Wednesday on a new species identified from fossilized skull bones in Alaska.

Scientists have crowned the fierce creature the "polar bear lizard," or Nanuqsaurus hoglundi, and they say it stood as tall as a modern man but was half the size of its very close cousin, T. rex, the "lizard king."

Astronomers have spotted the largest yellow star ever observed in our galaxy and 1,300 times larger than the sun.

The yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A is also in the top-10 of the largest stars known and about one million times brighter than the sun, Olivier Chesneau, whose team made the discovery, said Wednesday.

Japanese electronics giant Panasonic said Thursday it would give employees sent to China a wage premium to compensate for the country's hazardous air pollution, in a possible first for an international company.

The move was part of a wider deal reached in Japan's annual labor talks which saw major firms, including Panasonic and Toyota, agree to boost workers' salaries for the first time in years, amid concerns about an economic slowdown after a sales tax rise next month.

Music surfaces frequently in the great Nature vs. Nurture debate: Why can someone be a virtuoso pianist yet their neighbor be a musical duffer? Does the answer lie in genes or upbringing?

In a study published on Tuesday that compared hundreds of individuals, scientists said the first step towards answering the question may lie in DNA -- in several genes that detect and interpret sounds.