Edible bottles, windows that produce water, and environmentally-friendly insect repellent were among designs unveiled recently by AUB students at the university's annual biodiversity event, a press release said Thursday.

Around 170 AUB students from nine disciplines, including: chemistry, chemical engineering, education, linguistics, nutrition, instrumentation, environmental health, management, and agribusiness recently participated in the International Biodiversity Day at AUB (IBDAA 2012, an acronym that also means “innovation” in Arabic).

The history-making Dragon spacecraft is back on solid ground.

The SpaceX capsule arrived by barge at the Port of Los Angeles on Tuesday. The unmanned supply ship splashed into the Pacific, west of Baja California, last Thursday following an unprecedented trip to the International Space Station.

One of the heftiest dinosaurs that strode the Earth may have weighed as much as six buses less than thought, according to a new formula that will also place other dinos in a lower weight class.

The giraffe-necked, tree-top-grazing Berlin Brachiosaur was previously estimated to weigh as much as 80 tons (180,000 pounds).

Global warming could exact a devastating toll on the economies of Latin America and the Caribbean, with costs possibly exceeding $100 billion by 2050, the Inter-American Development Bank warned Tuesday.

In a new report, the Washington-based organization also called for "forceful" reductions in greenhouse gases to forestall some of the worst consequences of climate change.

A solar plane made history Tuesday by landing in the Moroccan capital after flying across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain on the world's first intercontinental flight in a plane powered by the sun.

Bertrand Piccard, a 54-year-old Swiss psychiatrist and balloonist, landed Solar Impulse at 11:30 pm (2230 GMT) under a full moon at Rabat Sale airport where he was welcomed by officials of the Moroccan Solar Energy Agency (MASEN).

Sky-gazers around the world held up their telescopes and viewing glasses Wednesday to watch a once-in-a-lifetime event as Venus slid across the sun.

The transit began shortly after 2200 GMT Tuesday in parts of North America, Central America and the northern part of South America, and was visible, with magnification, as a small black dot on the solar surface.

A Hong Kong conservation group said Tuesday increasing high-speed ferry traffic is contributing to a dramatic decline in Chinese white dolphin numbers in the city's waters.

Research by the Hong Kong Dolphin Conservation Society showed that catamaran and jetfoil ferry traffic is displacing dolphins from their habitats in the mouth of the Pearl River Delta.

China said Tuesday foreign embassies were acting illegally in issuing their own air quality readings and that only the government could release data on the nation's heavy pollution.

China's cities are among the world's most polluted, but until recently, official air quality measurements regularly rated their air quality as good -- even as data from the U.S. embassy in Beijing showed off-the-chart pollution.

Two young cheetahs that escaped from an Austrian zoo overnight returned to their enclosure a few hours later, led home by their mother's calls, the zoo said Tuesday.

"Their mother called them and they followed her cries," said Christine Beck, a spokeswoman at the zoo located near Salzburg.

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.