A meteorite found in the Sahara last year by Bedouin tribesmen is a rock from Mars, revealing that the Red Planet's crust formed 4.4 billion years ago, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Sold to the elite club of meteorite collectors, the extraordinary rock has been analysed by U.S. and French geologists.

Scientists on Wednesday said they had found a way to make raindrops bounce faster off surfaces, opening the way to new water-resistant materials from clothing to aircraft wings.

Reporting in the journal Nature, a team at Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) said they had slashed the amount of time a water drop stays in contact with a surface.

Today's kids can't keep up with their parents. An analysis of studies on millions of children around the world finds they don't run as fast or as far as their parents did when they were young.

On average, it takes children 90 seconds longer to run a mile (1.6 kilometer) than their counterparts did 30 years ago. Heart-related fitness has declined 5 percent per decade since 1975 for children ages 9 to 17.

Czech universities and firms have received the go-ahead to conduct scientific research on board an American space tourism aircraft, the Czech Space Office (CSO) said Tuesday.

The CSO inked the deal Monday with the firm XCOR Aerospace, which is putting the final touches on its Lynx aircraft designed to shuttle tourists to the brink of outer space.

Environment ministers meet in Warsaw on Wednesday to grapple with climate finance for poor nations a day after U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon urged leaders to ramp up efforts to curb global warming.

Finance threatens to derail the talks in the Polish capital which seek to pave the way to a new, global deal by 2015 to curb climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions.

Spain will appeal for damages over the Prestige tanker disaster which choked its northwest coast in oil, the government said Monday, after a court acquitted all defendants of causing the spill.

The court on Thursday acquitted the ship's crew and a top Spanish maritime official and awarded no compensation for the 2002 wreck, one of Europe's worst environmental disasters.

Much of the U.S. East Coast is expected to get a view of a mid-Atlantic rocket launch Tuesday night, when the Air Force and NASA will try to put 29 tiny satellites into orbit, including a smartphone and a satellite built by students.

The launch of the privately built Minotaur rocket is scheduled for 7:30 p.m. (0030 GMT) from NASA's Wallops Island, Virginia, launch site. Weather permitting, it should be possible to see it from Jacksonville to Maine and Montreal and as far west as Detroit and Dayton.

Emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and cement production reached a new high in 2012, rising 2.2 percent over 2011 due chiefly to an increase in coal-burning China, scientists said Tuesday.

Output of CO2 from these sources was a record 35 billion tonnes, 58 percent above 1990, the benchmark year for calculating greenhouse-gas levels, according to the annual analysis by an international group called the Global Carbon Project.

NASA on Monday launched its unmanned MAVEN spacecraft toward Mars to study the Red Planet's atmosphere for clues as to why Earth's neighbor lost its warmth and water over time.

The white Atlas V 401 rocket carrying the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) orbiter blasted off on schedule at 1:28 pm (1828 GMT).

Czech gold deposits are whetting the appetites of foreign prospectors hoping to see the new government lift a mining moratorium in the aftermath of snap elections.

But rather than a dream come true, the prospect of a gold rush is a nightmare for environmentalists and residents of the hilly region south of the capital Prague, a popular resort area that holds the biggest deposit.