NASA announced a Grand Challenge on Tuesday to enlist government agencies, industry, academics and citizen astronomers in the hunt for asteroids that could cause massive destruction.

The U.S. space agency said the challenge would complement another recently announced project to use a robot to redirect an asteroid into the Moon's orbit so astronauts could visit the object and study it.

The world's largest fully solar-powered boat, "Turanor PlanetSolar," docked in New York on Tuesday during a mission to study the effects of climate change on the Gulf Stream current.

Sponsored in part by the Swiss government, the 35-meter (115-foot) catamaran is crowned with solar panels that retract in port but open like a bird's wings to take best advantage of the sun's rays when at sea.

If you have just seen a play that you privately think is drivel, will you keep silent when everyone around you demands an encore?

Possibly not, says an unusual investigation published Wednesday in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

The World Bank on Wednesday warned that severe hardships from global warming could be felt within a generation, with new study detailing devastating impacts in Africa and Asia.

The report presents "an alarming scenario for the days and years ahead -- what we could face in our lifetime," said World Bank President Jim Yong Kim.

The deep-space telescope Herschel took its final bow on Monday, climaxing a successful four-year mission to observe the birth of stars and galaxies, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

The largest and most powerful infrared telescope in space, Herschel made over 35,000 scientific observations and amassed more than 25,000 hours of science data, it said.

A snap of a finger, a handful of scattered microphones and a computer algorithm are all it takes to create an accurate three-dimensional map of a room, Swiss and U.S. researchers said Monday.

The method, described in the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, measured the distance between echoes to create maps of both a university lecture room and a cathedral alcove.

Pesticides may kill off water insects and other small aquatic life by as much as 42 percent, according to an analysis of German, French and Australian rivers and streams published on Monday.

The study in U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is the first to compare regional biodiversity in polluted versus less polluted water, said scientists at the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres.

A solar-powered plane nearing the close of a cross-continental journey landed at Dulles International Airport outside the nation's capital early Sunday, only one short leg to New York remaining on a voyage that opened in May.

Solar Impulse's website said the aircraft with its massive wings and thousands of photovoltaic cells "gracefully touched down" at 12:15 a.m. EDT after 14 hours and four minutes of flight from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dulles in Washington's Virginia suburbs.

Most fossil fuels must remain in the ground because burning them will unleash changes which will "challenge the existence of our society", a new Australian government agency report warned Monday.

The Climate Commission study found that the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, a key Australian export, represented the most significant contributor to climate change.

Scientists will try to revive two species of giant Galapagos tortoises thought to have been extinct by breeding genetic relatives in captivity, experts leading the effort said.

The Galapagos Islands, located 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) off Ecuador's Pacific coast, are famed for the large number of species that have developed there in isolation.