Scientists say the Martian soil at the rover Curiosity's landing site contains minerals similar to what's found on Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano.

The finding released Tuesday is the latest step in trying to better understand whether the environment could have been hospitable to microbial life.

When Linda Bugbee's husband suggested traveling to the South Pacific to see a total solar eclipse, she was more enthusiastic about the cruise and visiting Tahiti than she was about seeing a celestial phenomenon.

Seven years later, Linda and George Bugbee, who live in Virginia, are embarking on their fourth trip to see a solar eclipse — this time in Australia, in November — but they still consider themselves "newbies."

The storm called Sandy messily morphed from hurricane into hybrid storm, losing the hurricane part of its name, but not the weather mayhem surrounding it.

The National Hurricane Center officially pronounced the storm "post-tropical" Monday evening, as the center of Sandy perched 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of Atlantic City, knocking at the coast's door. The change is part of a transition into a more diffuse storm that is bigger and sloppier, even as its force weakened.

Shark brains have been found to share several features with those of humans, a discovery which Australian researchers believe could be crucial to developing "repellents" for the killer great white species.

Great white sharks, otherwise known as white pointers and made famous by the horror movie "Jaws", have killed an unprecedented number of surfers and swimmers off Australia's west coast in the past year.

Nearly 1,500 years ago a tsunami triggered by a rockfall swept Lake Geneva, engulfing its shores with a wall of water up to 13 meters (42 feet) high, Swiss scientists reported on Sunday.

The incident suggests Geneva and Lausanne remain vulnerable today, as do other cities on the edge of mountain lakes and high-sided fjords, they said.

South Korea said Monday it would make another attempt to send a satellite into space next month after a scheduled rocket launch last week was cancelled because of a technical glitch.

A Science Ministry statement said the 140-tonne Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 (KSLV-1) would blast off sometime during a November 9-24 window from the Naro Space Center on the south coast.

Scientists announced Monday the discovery of a new species of lizard fighting to survive among the sand dunes outside Perth in Western Australia.

They fear it is only a matter of time before the six-centimeter (two-inch) long Ctenotus ora, or the coastal plains skink, will be extinct with urban sprawl rapidly closing in.

Earth's largest radio telescope is growing more powerful by the day on this remote plateau high above Chile's Atacama desert, where visitors often feel like they're planting the first human footprints on the red crust of Mars.

The 16,400-foot (5,000-meter) altitude, thin air and mercurial climate here can be unbearable. Visitors must breathe oxygen from a tank just to keep from fainting. Winds reach 62 mph (100 km) and temperatures drop to 10 below zero (minus 25 Celsius).

More than three million years ago, ancient ancestors of humans were walking upright -- but they could still climb trees like monkeys, a study showed Thursday in the U.S. journal "Science."

Based on careful analysis of a pair of shoulder blades -- both exceptionally well-preserved from a skeleton of a three-year-old Australopithecus afarensis girl -- scientists were able to settle a question intensely debated by anthropologists for more than three decades.

Thousands of people in an eastern Chinese city clashed with police while protesting the proposed expansion of a petrochemical factory that they say would spew pollution and damage public health, townspeople said Saturday.

Pollution has become a major source of unrest in China, as members of the rising middle class become more outspoken against environmentally risky projects in their backyards.