NASA said Thursday all was well ahead of its nail-biting mission to Mars, with its most advanced robotic rover poised to hunt for clues about past life and water on Earth's nearest planetary neighbor.

On a two-year journey to seek out signs of environments that once sustained life, the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory and the largest and most sophisticated rover ever built, Curiosity, is set for 1:31 am August 6 (0531 GMT).

The recipe for the perfect sandcastle? A delicate balance of 99 percent sand and one percent water, say physicists who have given new meaning to mixing work and play.

For their contribution to science, researchers in Amsterdam and Paris spent hours building beach sand columns in their laboratories to come up with a complicated mathematical formula for a stable and long-lasting sandcastle.

Dust and aerosol pollution from Asia travels across the ocean and sullies the air in the United States and Canada, possibly worsening the effects of climate change, a NASA-backed study showed Thursday.

About half of the aerosol particles in North America come from foreign sources, and most are just from naturally occurring dust rather than from burning coal or other fossil fuels, said the research published in the journal Science.

Drilling of the seabed off Antarctica has revealed that rainforest grew on the frozen continent 52 million years ago, scientists said Thursday, warning it could be ice-free again within decades.

The study of sediment cores drilled from the ocean floor off Antarctica's east coast revealed fossil pollens that had come from a "near-tropical" forest covering the continent in the Eocene period, 34-56 million years ago.

The biggest, worst space rover ever built for exploring an alien planet is nearing its August 6 landing on Mars, and the U.S. space agency is anxious for success despite huge risks.

A popular Internet video by NASA called "Seven Minutes of Terror" depicts the high drama involved with the first-ever attempt to use a rocket-powered sky crane to lower the car-sized machine gently onto the surface of the Red Planet.

Even as Man's output of Earth-warming CO2 has risen, so has the capacity of plants and the oceans to absorb it, scientists said Wednesday, but warned this may not last forever.

Carbon storage by land and sea, known as carbon sinks, has more than doubled in the past 50 years from about 2.4 billion tons in 1960 to some five billion tons in 2010, said a study in Nature.

One day 370 million years ago, a tiny larva came to a sticky end when it plunged into a shrimp-infested swamp and drowned.

Unearthed in modern-day Belgium, the humble bug now looks set to plug a giant gap in the fossil record.

Heartened by a glimpse of what may be the Higgs boson, scientists at the CERN physics lab are smashing particles with new vigor in a quest to understand why matter has mass and other riddles of the natural universe.

Rather than the end of the line, the July 4 unveiling of a boson with Higgs-like characteristics opens new scientific frontiers, enthuse researchers at the Large Hydron Collider near Geneva.

Female parrot finches can match their offspring's gender to prevailing living conditions, producing more sons in lean times, scientists in Australia said Wednesday.

The finding presents the first proof for an evolutionary theory that female animals should adjust the sex ratio of their offspring to environmental factors for maximum survival, they wrote.

The highly anticipated landing of NASA's sophisticated $2.5 billion rover on Mars will be broadcast on a large screen in New York City's Times Square, NASA said on Tuesday.

The touchdown of the Curiosity rover, equipped with a sophisticated roving toolkit for analyzing the terrain for signs that microbial life once existed, is scheduled for August 6 at 1:31 am Eastern time (0531 GMT).