Lab mice trained to fear a particular smell can transfer the impulse to their unborn sons and grandsons through a mechanism in their sperm, a study said Sunday.

The research claims to provide evidence for the concept of animals "inheriting" a memory of their ancestors' traumas, and responding as if they had lived the events themselves.

China will launch its first ever moon rover mission on Monday, state media said, as Beijing embarks on the latest stage in its ambitious space program.

A rocket carrying the vehicle, named "Jade Rabbit" in a nod to Chinese folklore, will blast off at 1:30 am local time (Sunday 1730 GMT).

Some large, grass-eating mammals, such as elephants, rhinos and camels, gather together not only when they eat, but also when they defecate.

The group poop, researchers have surmised, has several important functions.

Comet ISON appears to have flown too close to the surface of the sun Thursday and vanished as it circled the fiery surface, astronomers said.

The large block of ice and rock had been expected to skim just 730,000 miles (1.17 million kilometers) above the sun's surface around 1830 GMT.

Private U.S. company SpaceX postponed the launch of a rocket carrying its first telecommunications satellite on Thursday after two unsuccessful attempts at take-off.

The launch at a U.S. Air Force base in Cape Canaveral, Florida was moved to Thursday after an attempt on Monday was aborted.

China's largest desert freshwater lake has shrunk by one-third in the last 13 years, state media said Thursday, as the country's breakneck modernization continues to damage the environment.

Northern China's Hongjiannao Lake covers 32.16 square kilometers (12.86 sq miles), less than half its size in 1969 and two-thirds of its area in 2000, Xinhua news agency said.

It's crunch time for a comet from the fringes of the solar system as it hurtles toward a close encounter with the sizzling sun.

Comet ISON is expected to get closest to the sun at 1837 GMT (1:37 p.m. EST) on Thursday.

A rare full skeleton of a huge diplodocus dinosaur sold in Britain for £400,000 ($630,000, 470,000 euros) on Wednesday, an auction house said.

Nicknamed Misty, the 150-million-year-old fossil was bought to go on public display, said Summers Place Auctions in Billingshurst, southern England.

A Jordan-based scientific research project whose members include Iran and the Palestinian Authority has chosen an Israeli as vice president, the candidate's university confirmed.

Scientists from states participating in the project elected Eliezer Rabinovici, a physics professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, as vice-president of the Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East (SESAME), the university told AFP.

Authorities in the capital have destroyed more than 500 open-air barbecues "to cut PM2.5" — the tiny particulate matter in the air that can enter deep into the lungs.

Photos carried by state media showed workers on Tuesday cutting pieces of metal with sparks flying as city wardens looked on.