Physicists looking at anomalies in Earth's gravity have turned to a garden gnome named Kern, which has been shipped around the globe to have himself weighed at locations ranging from Lima, Mumbai and Mexico to Sydney, New Caledonia and the South Pole.

The experiment is a twist on the "travelling gnome" prank, in which a garden ornament is mysteriously stolen, photographed at various locations -- with the pictures posted on the Internet -- and then returned home.

A former expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) claimed Monday he was falsely accused of harassing co-workers about religion, as he took the stand at an unfair dismissal trial.

Computer administrator David Coppedge, who describes himself as an evangelical Christian, was fired last year after expressing support for intelligent design to fellow employees.

An American archaeologist has used satellite images and a computer program to uncover thousands of ancient human settlements in Syria, according to a research study published Monday.

Software developed jointly by Harvard University professor Jason Ur and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers can identify the remains of homes from the satellite images.

NASA has postponed the launch of a new X-ray telescope to allow more time to check an issue with the rocket that will boost it into orbit.

The space agency said Friday the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array will not launch this month as planned. A new launch date has not been set, but NASA expects it to occur sometime in the next two months.

Air Force ground controllers last year successfully rescued a $1.7 billion military communications satellite that had been stranded in the wrong orbit and at risk of blowing up, possibly because some cloth had been left in a fuel line during manufacture.

Crews used backup propulsion systems to coax the satellite more than 21,000 miles (33,800 kilometers) higher. It took 14 months as the satellite battled gravity and dodged space junk. It finally arrived at its planned orbit last October.

A unique thermo solar power station in southern Spain can shrug off cloudy days: energy stored when the sun shines lets it produce electricity even during the night.

The Gemasolar station, up and running since last May, stands out in the plains of Andalusia.

Neutrinos do not go faster than light, according to fresh measurements of a test last year that had suggested the particles broke the Universe's speed limit, CERN said on Friday.

Judea Pearl, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, has been awarded the prestigious 2011 A.M. Turing Award.

Pearl, 75, was being honored for "innovations that enabled remarkable advances in the partnership between humans and machines," the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) said.

A panel of experts on Thursday considered a proposal to repatriate Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's three-mast ship Maud from the Canadian Arctic.

A Norwegian group asked the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board to revisit a decision in December denying an export permit for the ship, after residents of Cambridge Bay, Canada opposed losing a treasured artifact that has become a tourist attraction in the far north.

The number of Monarch butterflies wintering in Mexico dropped 28 percent this year, according to a report released Thursday, a decline some experts attribute to droughts in parts of the United States and Canada where the butterflies breed and begin their long migration south.

Others say damage to wintering grounds in central Mexico's mountains remains a factor in the decline, citing deforestation of the fir and pine forests they favor.