China has added two more satellites to a global navigation network that will eventually compete with America's Global Positioning System.

State media say the 14th and 15th satellites in the Beidou system were launched aboard a single Long March 3B rocket early Wednesday. The system, whose name means compass in English, is due to have 35 satellites in total by its 2020 completion date.

In the far north of Siberia, Russian scientists have stepped up research on a once-secret deposit of diamonds whose scale dwarfs anything ever discovered and could turn world markets "upside down".

Soviet scientists had in the 1970s uncovered the 100-kilometer (60-mile) Popigai Crater left by a huge asteroid in Siberia 35 million years ago.

Scientists in California have shed light on a marine mystery: how diving mammals can hunt for food at great depths without getting the "bends," according to a study published on Tuesday.

Formally known as depression sickness, the bends occur when nitrogen gas, compressed in the bloodstream at depth, expands during ascent, causing pain and sometimes death.

Gerard Liger-Belair lives in a bubble, and he doesn't care who knows it.

Bubbles are his passion. And they have given the 41-year-old French scientist arguably the best job in all of physics.

An international three-man crew onboard a Russian-made Soyuz capsule touched down successfully on the cloudless central Kazakhstan steppe Monday morning after 123 days at the International Space Station.

A fleet of Russian Mi-8 helicopters deployed from towns near the landing site ahead of the capsule's arrival early Monday morning to ensure swift interception.

Bad weather is delaying the transfer of the shuttle Endeavour from Florida to California where it will be put on show, the U.S. space agency said Sunday.

Endeavour, which completed its final mission last year, was scheduled to leave the Kennedy Space Center on the back of a modified Boeing 747 on Monday but inclement conditions along the flight path pushed the departure to Tuesday, NASA said in a statement.

A woman took command of the International Space Station for only the second time Monday as three U.S. and Russian colleagues made a safe return from the orbiting space lab to the Kazakh steppe.

The Soyuz TMA-04M capsule touched down with U.S. astronaut Joe Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin aboard, after deploying a huge white parachute and making a pin-point descent with helicopters tracking its progress.

NASA's Opportunity rover, older brother to the Curiosity rover that landed on Mars last month, has made a new discovery that geologists find both puzzling and exciting, the U.S. space agency said Friday.

Opportunity, which has been on the Red Planet since 2004, has come across an outcrop of tiny spheres -- up to around an eighth of an inch (three millimeters) in diameter -- the likes of which scientists have never seen before.

U.S. scientists have for the first time found proof that planets can form and survive around sun-like stars within dense star clusters, NASA said Friday.

Astronomers have spotted two Jupiter-like orbs in the Beehive Cluster, a collection of around 1,000 stars that appear to be swarming around a common center.

The cremated remains of legendary American astronaut Neil Armstrong were scattered at sea Friday, in a ceremony aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier paying final tribute to the first man to set foot on the moon, NASA said.

U.S. Navy personnel carried Armstrong's remains to the Atlantic Ocean one day after a somber memorial ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral for the famously reserved Apollo 11 commander, who died August 25 at the age of 82.