A lobster thrown live into boiling water may suffer for many seconds, said a scientist who argued Thursday that crustaceans can likely feel pain.

A set of experiments on crabs revealed that the animals are willing to give up a valuable dark hiding place in order to avoid an electric shock, an indicator of pain, said a study in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

The U.S. and European space agencies announced a new partnership Wednesday pairing a European cargo module with NASA's Orion space capsule, which aims to take astronauts into deep space.

The agreement covers Orion's first planned mission, set for 2017, which will take the spacecraft on an unmanned fly-by around the moon.

The complex social structure of the red fire ant, a fast-spreading invasive insect with a painful bite, is made possible by a DNA fusion known as a supergene, biologists said Wednesday.

It is the first study to link supergenes to animal behavior, the scientists reported in the journal Nature, and predicted a similar effect would be found in other species.

The European Commission hinted on Wednesday that it could ban several insecticides, some made by German chemicals giant Bayer, after scientists found disturbing evidence of harm to bees.

The EU's food saftey agency had reported "disturbing conclusions on three types of insecticides," a spokesman for EU Health Commissioner Tonio Borg said.

The Mars rover Curiosity will soon begin to drill into the Red Planet for the first time, mission officials said Tuesday ahead of the highly anticipated endeavor.

Scientists behind the $2.5 billion mission also explained the nature of the small "Martian flower," which had caused a lot of buzz online because it was strikingly different from the surrounding rock.

South Korea will make another bid at the end of this month to put a satellite in orbit and gain entry to an elite global space club that includes Asian powers China, India and Japan.

The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology announced Wednesday a January 30-February 8 window for launching the 140-tonne Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 (KSLV-1) from the Naro Space Center on the south coast.

Remember that dazzling moment in the "Star Wars" movies when the Millennium Falcon goes into hyperspace and a kaleidoscope of stars streaks past the ship?

Sadly -- like a lot of things in sci-fi movies -- that really wouldn't happen, a team of British science students have calculated.

Chimpanzees, in a test of their willingness to share with other chimps, displayed a surprising sense of fairness, scientists say, debunking the idea that only humans boast that quality.

The researchers said they are the first to show chimpanzees have a sense of fairness and that this may have evolved over time to aid their survival.

Australia's extreme summer heatwave, which caused devastating bushfires and saw temperature forecasts go off the scale, is part of a global warming trend, the U.N.'s climate panel chief said Tuesday.

As the 250 lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s next major report meet in the southern Australian city of Hobart, the body's chairman Rajendra Pachauri said the link was clear.

Japanese scientists have successfully bred a type of salmon using surrogate parents of a different species, in a breakthrough that could help preserve endangered creatures, the chief researcher said Tuesday.

Researchers froze the testes of the yamame salmon, a fish indigenous to Japan that lives its entire life in rivers, before extracting primordial germ cells and implanting them into otherwise sterile rainbow trout hatchlings.