Thanks to evolution, hungry desert-dwelling wild mice can shrug off the pain of scorpions' stings in order to gobble them up for a meal, scientists said Thursday.

This rare survival tactic has helped grasshopper mice use the venom of the Arizona bark scorpion, found in the southwestern United States and Mexico, to numb its excruciating sting.

Scientists in China said Thursday they had designed a "smart" window that can both save and generate energy, and may ultimately reduce heating and cooling costs for buildings.

While allowing us to feel close to the outside world, windows cause heat to escape from buildings in winter and let the Sun's unwanted rays enter in summer.

The amount of harmful greenhouse gas pollution spewed into the atmosphere by large U.S. power plants has declined 10 percent since 2010, the U.S. government said Wednesday.

The results came from the third year of carbon pollution emissions data that the Environmental Protection Agency collects from nearly 8,000 facilities including power plants, oil refineries and steel mills.

Japanese scientists readying to blast a crater in an asteroid to find out what it is made of said Wednesday they have successfully tested their new space cannon.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said the huge weapon would fire a metal bullet at the surface of asteroid 1999JU3 some time in 2018.

British engineers said Wednesday they had taken inspiration from dolphins for a new type of radar device that could easily track miners trapped underground or skiers buried in an avalanche.

The device, like dolphins, sends out two pulses in quick succession to allow for a targeted search for semiconductor devices, cancelling any background "noise", the team wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical and Physical Sciences.

A bout of choking smog that brought life to a standstill in a far northeast Chinese city for three days has dissipated, with flights resuming and students returning to school Wednesday.

The heavy pollution, which drew national and international headlines, was largely due to coal-fired heating and the burning of large amounts of straw as winter approaches, local environmental officials in the city of Harbin have said.

Scientists on Tuesday set November 5 for the delayed launch of India's first mission to Mars, which was postponed due to problems in positioning a seaborne tracking system.

Blast-off for the unmanned Mars Orbiter Mission had to be rescheduled after the state-run Indian Space Agency Organization (ISRO) said at the weekend that it would be unable to launch as expected on October 28.

The silvery carcasses of two giant oarfish were discovered along the Southern California coast last week, baffling scientists and gaining a growing online following who gawked at the bony, snake-like creatures.

A 14-foot (4.3 meter) oarfish washed up on a beach in the San Diego County coastal city of Oceanside last Friday. Several days earlier, a snorkeler found the carcass of an 18-foot oarfish off Catalina Island and dragged it to shore with some help.

Authorities in Vietnam have seized 2.4 tons of elephant tusks illegally imported from Malaysia in the second large seizure this month.

Customs official Truong Cong Thanh in the northern port city of Hai Phong says the tusks were found in a container Monday. The cargo had been declared as sea shells.

Thick smog enveloped a major Chinese city for a third day Tuesday, with schools and a regional airport shut and poor visibility forcing ground transport to a halt in places.

Images from Harbin, a northeastern city of more than 10 million people and the host of a popular annual ice festival, showed roads shrouded in smog, with visibility in some areas reduced to less than 50 meters.