A Swiss adventurer took off Tuesday into the night skies above Madrid and headed for Rabat on the world's first intercontinental flight in a solar-powered plane.

Bertrand Piccard, 54-year-old psychiatrist and balloonist, piloted the Solar Impulse plane, a giant as big as an Airbus A340 but as light as an average family car, on the daring voyage from Europe to Africa.

When Venus next week eclipses Earth, an event that will not occur again for more than a century, millions of sky gazers may have romantic thoughts about our closest neighbor and its twilight beauty.

But the truth is that Venus is a hell that would have surpassed even the imagination of Dante, and it has caused more grief and disappointment than any other planet in the Solar System.

The prototype space shuttle that arrived in New York City by air earlier this spring is on the move again, this time by sea.

The Enterprise had been parked at Kennedy Airport since it flew from Washington to New York atop a 747 jet.

In the late eighth century, Earth was hit by a mystery blast of cosmic rays, according to a Japanese study that found a relic of the powerful event in cedar trees.

Analysis of two ancient trees found a surge in carbon-14 -- a carbon isotope that derives from cosmic radiation -- which occurred just in AD 774 and AD 775, the team report in the journal Nature on Sunday.

The French government is to ban a pesticide made by Swiss giant Syngenta used in rapeseed cultivation that has been found to shorten bees' lifespan, Agriculture Minister Stephane Le Foll said Friday.

"I have warned the group that sells Cruiser that I envisage withdrawing the licence to market," Le Foll said after the National Food, Environment and Work Safety Agency (ANSES) issued a damning report on the pesticide.

UNESCO on Saturday urged decisive action from Australia to protect the Great Barrier Reef from a gas and mining boom, warning it risked being put on its list of world heritage sites deemed "in danger".

Australia is riding an unprecedented wave of resources investment due to booming demand from Asia, with projects worth Aus$450 billion (U.S. $435 billion) in the pipeline.

Nearly a year after they joined the periodic table, two man-made elements have been officially named.

What used to be element 114 is now flerovium, honoring the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia, where it was created. Element 116 is now livermorium, for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., home of a scientific team that participated in its creation in Dubna. The chemical symbols are Fl and Lv.

U.S. company SpaceX's cargo vessel Thursday splash landed in the Pacific Ocean, capping a successful mission to the International Space Station that blazed a new path for private spaceflight.

"This really couldn't have gone better," said SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk after the unmanned capsule landed in the waters off the Mexican coast at 11:42 am Eastern time (1542 GMT).

Our galaxy is on a collision course with its nearest neighbor, Andromeda, and the head-on crash is expected in four billion years, the U.S. space agency NASA said on Thursday.

Astronomers have long theorized that a clash of these galaxy titans was on the way, though it was unknown how severe it might be, or when, with guesses ranging from three to six billion years.

The world's air has reached what scientists call a troubling new milestone for carbon dioxide, the main global warming pollutant.

Monitoring stations across the Arctic this spring are measuring more than 400 parts per million of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere. The number isn't quite a surprise, because it's been rising at an accelerating pace. Years ago, it passed the 350 ppm mark that many scientists say is the highest safe level for carbon dioxide. It now stands globally at 395.