The U.S. space agency is planning for a robotic spaceship to capture a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator disclosed Friday.

The plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth, Sen. Bill Nelson said.

Nancy Bertler and her team took a freezer to the coldest place on Earth, endured weeks of primitive living and risked spending the winter in Antarctic darkness, to go get ice — ice that records our climate's past and could point to its future.

They drilled out hundreds of ice cores, each slightly longer and wider than a baseball bat, from the half-mile-thick ice covering Antarctica's Roosevelt Island. The cores, which may total 150,000 years of snowfall, almost didn't survive the boat ride to New Zealand because of a power outage.

Automatic spending cuts have hit America's science and research sectors especially hard, according to experts, who warn of potentially dire implications for the nation's overall competitiveness.

As the "sequester," a package of spending cuts imposed last month, begins to pinch, many research projects will be slowed or scuttled, from cancer therapies to efforts to convert medical breakthroughs into marketable therapies.

The deep oceans have yielded many mysteries that have puzzled people for centuries, from the giant squid to huge jellyfish that look like UFOs. To that list add a fish with totally transparent blood.

The Ocellated Ice Fish lives in the freezing waters of the Antarctic Ocean, where it manages to keep its body doing all the things that other fish do, but with blood that is absolutely clear, researchers told Agence France Presse on Friday.

The Italian government has asked the European Commission not to renew authorization of a key genetically-modified corn, according to a letter seen by Agence France Presse on Thursday.

The product is U.S. agri-giant Monsanto's MON 810 maize, one of only two GM products cleared to be grown in Europe along with German conglomerate BASF's Amflora potato.

Local bans are unlikely to stop bottled water overtaking soda pop as Americans' preferred beverage by the end of the decade, the chairman of Nestle Waters North America said Thursday.

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Kim Jeffery forecast that "within the next five or six years," bottled water would become "the number one beverage in America" as consumers turn away from carbonated soft drinks.

Scientists in Japan said Friday they had found a way to "read" people's dreams, using MRI scanners to unlock some of the secrets of the unconscious mind.

Researchers have managed what they said was "the world's first decoding" of night-time visions, the subject of centuries of speculation that have captivated humanity since ancient times.

A Seychelles freshwater turtle species declared extinct after decades of futile searches, in fact never existed, scientists said Thursday.

While Man has the extinction of several turtle and tortoise species on his conscience, DNA evidence has now cleared him of exterminating Pelusios seychellensis, a team from Germany and Austria wrote in the journal PloS One.

Canadian federal police on Wednesday charged two former government scientists with allegedly trafficking in dangerous and highly contagious germs.

Klaus Nielsen and Wei Ling Yu, former researchers at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA), are accused of attempting to export harmful pathogens that could infect humans and livestock to China.

It is one of the cosmos' most mysterious unsolved cases: dark matter. It is supposedly what holds the universe together. We can't see it, but scientists are pretty sure it's out there.

Led by a dogged, Nobel Prize-winning gumshoe who has spent 18 years on the case, scientists put a $2 billion detector aboard the International Space Station to try to track down the stuff. And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.