At daybreak Tuesday, the oldest of NASA's retired shuttle fleet will leave its home at Kennedy Space Center for the final time, riding on top a modified jumbo jet.

Its destination: the Smithsonian Institution's hangar outside Washington, D.C.

An international team of scientists said Sunday the largest brain study of its kind had found a gene linked to intelligence, a small piece in the puzzle as to why some people are smarter than others.

A variant of this gene "can tilt the scales in favor of a higher intelligence", study leader Paul Thompson told Agence France Presse, stressing though that genetic blessings were not the only factor in brainpower.

One of the world's biggest glacier regions has so far resisted global warming that has ravaged mountain ice elsewhere, scientists reported on Sunday.

For years, experts have debated the state of glaciers that smother nearly 20,000 square kilometers (7,700 sq. miles) of the Karakoram Range in the western Himalayas.

Antarctica boasts almost twice as many emperor penguins as previously thought, researchers have discovered using satellite mapping technology to count the iceberg-huddling birds from above.

An international team of scientists led by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) found 595,000 birds, far beyond previous estimates of 270,000 to 350,000, according to the study on Thursday in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

The U.S. space agency said Friday it is seeking fresh ideas for robotic missions to explore Mars, after budget cuts nixed a planned partnership with the European space agency.

"NASA is reformulating the Mars Exploration Program to be responsive to high-priority science goals and the president's challenge of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s," the agency said.

Baboons can recognize scores of written words, a feat that raises intriguing questions about how we learn to read, scientists reported on Thursday.

In a specially-made facility in France where they could come and go at will, monkeys learned to differentiate between a real word, such as KITE, and a nonsense word such as ZEVS.

Scientists sketched a vision on Friday of converting the world's cities into giant sunlight reflectors to help fight global warming but met with skepticism from fellow academics.

Gradually replacing traditional urban roofs and roads with white or lighter-colored materials would yield a cooling benefit that, over 50 years, would be the equivalent of a reduction of between 25 and 150 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), researchers in Canada said.

Sea levels in the southwest Pacific started rising drastically in the 1880s, with a notable peak in the 1990s thought to be linked to human-induced climate change, according to a new study.

The research, which examined sediment core samples taken from salt marshes in southern Australia's Tasmania Island, used geochemistry to establish a chronology of sea level changes over the past 200 years.

The coelacanth, a "living fossil" fish that predates the dinosaurs, is some 17 million years older than previously thought, scientists have found.

The earliest known skull of a coelacanth, unearthed in Yunnan, China dates the fish in its current shape to about 400 million years ago, according to research by the Chinese Academy of Sciences published on Tuesday in Nature Communications.

Scientists have sent robot scouts into deep space and unraveled the genome, yet on Wednesday were forced to admit they were still baffled by how homing pigeons navigate.

Experts at Vienna's Institute of Molecular Pathology said they had overturned claims that the birds' feat is due to iron-rich nerve cells in the beak that are sensitive to Earth's magnetic field.