Scientists said on Wednesday they had identified a genetic variant that influences gait in horses, a potential boon for breeders but also for the quest to fix human spine injuries.

A patented DNA test will become available from Thursday, enabling horse buyers to spot an animal with a higher genetic chance of success at harness racing, they said.

Astronomers using a powerful radio telescope in Chile said Wednesday that they had discovered sugar molecules, one of the building blocks of life, orbiting a young star similar to the Sun.

"This is the first time sugar been found in space around such a star," the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which is administering the project, said Wednesday.

Polonium, the poison suspected of being used to kill Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2004, is a highly radioactive material rarely found outside military and scientific circles.

Also known as Radium F, it is a rare but naturally occurring metalloid found in uranium ores that emits highly hazardous alpha, or positively charged, particles.

NASA transmitted the first song to be broadcast from Mars on Tuesday, by Grammy-winning U.S. musician will.i.am, as part of efforts to inspire young people to get interested in science.

"Reach for the Stars" was then beamed back by the Curiosity rover, which landed on the surface of the Red Planet earlier this month, to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Having a smaller family is a springboard for giving future generations the chance of greater prosperity, according to a Swedish study published on Wednesday.

Providing scientific support to what is anecdotal evidence, it says that in an advanced industrialized society, having fewer offspring means children benefit from greater parental investment and from inherited capital.

Thousands of Morocco's unemployed slum-dwellers head to the Atlantic coast every morning to scrape a living as illegal mussel pickers. But experts say they threaten the health of the marine ecosystem.

The stretch of coast between Rabat and Casablanca, Morocco's economic capital renowned for its sprawling slums, or "bidonvilles," is the most popular destination for these unlicensed fishermen, who flock to the area at low tide.

Scientists have found three well preserved ancient insects frozen in amber — and time — in what is Earth's oldest bug trap.

The discoveries of amber-encased insects in Italy may sound like something out of "Jurassic Park" but these bugs are even older than that. They are about 230 million years old, which puts them in the Triassic time period, and about 100 million years older than what had been the previously known oldest critters trapped in fossilized tree resin, or amber.

The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its smallest point ever in a milestone that may show that worst-case forecasts on climate change are coming true, U.S. scientists said Monday.

The extent of ice observed on Sunday broke a record set in 2007 and will likely melt further with several weeks of summer still to come, according to data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the NASA space agency.

Some aliens arrived as stowaways. Others were brought in deliberately, for fun or profit. And others were so tiny that nobody noticed them until way too late.

They became a nightmare. They killed and devoured natives stole their homes, sickened them with pathogens.

The challenges of climate change and protecting one of the world's last pristine ocean environments are set to dominate this week's Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in the Cook Islands.

But the expected presence of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will ensure geo-political concerns, particularly China's growing influence in the South Pacific, are also high on the agenda at the regional summit.