Bottom trawling is dramatically altering the ocean floor and harming habitats, similar to the way that farming has permanently changed the landscape, a study said on Wednesday.

Much has been written about trawling's indiscriminate destruction of fish stocks, but a team of marine scientists in Spain, writing in the journal Nature, said some of its practices damaged the fabric of the ecosystem.

Two International Space Station crew members on Wednesday successfully completed a spacewalk to install a new power switching unit, the U.S. space agency NASA said.

American Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide had to contend with a sticky bolt that prevented them from completing the installation in a previous spacewalk last week.

Scientists using a high-powered telescope in Chile have discovered an ancient star that seems oddly impervious to aging.

The star is in a globular cluster dating back to the universe's distant past, but new images from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile show that one of the stars still has a considerable amount of lithium.

Staple food prices may double within the next two decades due to climate change and an increase in extreme weather including droughts and hurricanes, the anti-poverty group Oxfam said Wednesday.

Oxfam warned current climate change research isn't taking into account extreme weather events, which it warned could also temporarily send up prices by a similar amount.

Natto, the Japanese breakfast dish of fermented soybeans, has a smell likened to sweaty feet but researchers have come up with an unlikely way of making it less whiffy -- using bacteria from Chinese dust clouds.

Microscopic organisms found in the yellow fug that drifts over from China are almost identical to the reagent usually added to the beans to start the decomposition process, said Teruya Maki, an assistant professor at Kanazawa University.

NASA's Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is nearing the edge of the solar system and may already be "dancing on the edge" of outer space, the scientists behind the project said Tuesday.

In a lecture marking the approaching 35th anniversary of the Voyager project, Ed Stone said it could be "days, months or years" before it finally breaks into interstellar space.

A memorial service for Neil Armstrong, the U.S. astronaut who became the first human being to set foot on the moon, will be held in the U.S. capital Washington on September 13, NASA said Tuesday.

NASA chief Charles Bolden, present and former astronauts and other dignitaries are expected to attend the ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral in honor of Armstrong, who died on August 25 at the age of 82.

The 13th tropical depression of the Atlantic hurricane season formed far out in the ocean Monday and was posing no immediate threat to land.

The depression was located 1,350 miles northwest of the Cape Verde Islands on Monday afternoon and had maximum sustained winds of 35 mph, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. It was creeping northwest at 3 mph and was expected to continue in a northwesterly direction.

A huge Dutch super-trawler was Tuesday given the go-ahead to fish in Australian waters but with tough conditions to minimize by-catch such as dolphins, seals and sea lions.

The 9,500-tonne FV Margiris repelled Greenpeace protesters to dock at Port Lincoln in South Australia last Thursday for re-flagging as an Australian vessel before its proposed deployment to Tasmania for bait-fishing.

Peruvian authorities say wastewater laced with heavy metals from a major zinc mine has spilled into a tributary of the Amazon, contaminating at least six miles of the waterway.

Pasco regional mining environmental engineer Juan Escalante tells The Associated Press that an unknown quantity of toxic wastewater from the Atacocha mine escaped from a sedimentation well Wednesday into the Huallaga River. The mine is owned by the Brazilian company Votorantim.