A Canadian-built helicopter that is powered by a human riding a bicycle has become the first winner of a decades-old $250,000 engineering prize, the U.S. awarder said Friday.

The American Helicopter Society had never given out its Igor Sikorsky Human-Powered Helicopter Award -- initiated 33 years ago -- until the team from the University of Toronto snatched it this week.

Astronomers have for the first time managed to determine the color of a planet outside our solar system, a blue gas giant 63 light-years away.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, an international team said the planet known as HD 189733B would look like a deep blue dot if viewed up close.

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Astronomers said Thursday they had found another blue planet a long, long way from Earth -- no water world, but a scorching, hostile place where it rains glass, sideways.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists from NASA and its European counterpart, ESA, have for the first time determined the true color of an exoplanet, celestial bodies which orbit stars other than our own Sun.

Large earthquakes around the world have been found to trigger tremors at U.S sites where wastewater from gas drilling operations is injected into the ground, a U.S. study said Thursday.

For instance, the massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake in Japan in 2011 set off a swarm of earthquakes in the western Texas town of Snyder near the Cogdell oil field, culminating in a 4.5 magnitude quake there about six months later, said the research in the journal Science.

Our solar system has a tail, just like comets. Now the U.S. space agency can prove it.

Scientists revealed images Wednesday showing the tail emanating from the bullet-shaped region of space under the grip of the sun, including the solar system and beyond. The region is known as the heliosphere, and the tail is called the heliotail.

Japan's nuclear regulator says radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima power plant is probably leaking into the Pacific Ocean, a problem long suspected by experts but denied by the plant's operator.

Officials from the Nuclear Regulation Authority said a leak is "strongly suspected" and urged plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. to determine where the water may be leaking from and assess the environmental and other risks, including the impact on the food chain. The watchdog said Wednesday it would form a panel of experts to look into ways to contain the problem.

Astronomers on Wednesday reported their best observation yet of a massive star embryo growing within a dark cloud -- the largest stellar "womb" ever spotted in our Milky Way galaxy.

The star, which could grow to 100 times the mass of our Sun and up to a million times brighter, was spotted by the most powerful radio telescope on Earth -- the ALMA international astronomy facility located in Chile, according to a paper published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The latest models of Mercedes cars cannot be sold in France as they still use an air conditioning refrigerant the EU says emits excessive greenhouse gases and should be replaced, the German auto company said on Tuesday.

"Only new cars are subject to the measure," a company spokesman told Agence France Presse adding that customers confronted with the ban are to be offered alternate models.

Physicists said Tuesday that a so-called optical lattice clock, touted by some as the time-measuring device of the future, had passed a key accuracy test.

The performance boosts chances that the world's timekeepers will one day adopt it for defining the second, they said.