North Korea may have the bomb, but it hasn't perfected ways to put one onto a missile that could strike faraway enemies like the United States.

This is why Pyongyang's announcement that it will launch a satellite on a long-range rocket next month is drawing so much attention: Washington says North Korea uses these launches as cover for testing missile systems for nuclear weapons that could target Alaska and beyond.

A discarded chunk of a Russian rocket missed the International Space Station early Saturday. However, it came close enough to force six astronauts to seek shelter in escape capsules.

NASA says the space junk was barely close enough to be a threat. Had it hit, however, the station could have been dangerous. So the astronauts — two Americans, three Russians and a Dutchman — woke early and went into two Soyuz vehicles ready to rocket back to Earth just in case.

A prehistoric monster snake is making a quick stopover in New York City's Grand Central Terminal.

The full-scale replica of the Titanoboa was unveiled Thursday as a promotion for an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

An automated craft laden with supplies for the International Space Station (ISS) headed into space on Friday in the heaviest launch ever undertaken by Europe.

The 20-tonne vessel, named after 20th-century Italian physicist, Edoardo Amaldi, was taken aloft by a heavyweight version of the Ariane 5 launcher at 01:34 am (0434 GMT).

Science experiments devised by teenage students, one from Egypt and two from the United States, will be conducted in space as part of a move by YouTube and Lenovo to inspire young minds.

Winners of a global YouTube Space Lab competition were announced Thursday, with 18-year-old Amr Mohamed of Egypt taking the honor for older students while Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma was deemed top submission in a younger group.

European researchers said Thursday they have created a device invisible to a static magnetic field that could have practical military and medical applications.

Fedor Gomory and colleagues in Slovakia and Spain designed a cloak for a direct current, or dc, magnetic field that is static and produced by a permanent magnet or coil carrying a direct current.

Hungarian Endre Szemeredi has won the Abel prize, considered to be the "Nobel" for mathematics, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced on Wednesday.

Szemeredi, 71, who works both at the Hungarian Alfred Renyi Institute of Mathematics and at the US Rutgers university's department of computer sciences, was awarded the prize for his work in so-called discrete mathematics, the study of mathematical structures.

A 6.7-magnitude earthquake struck Papua New Guinea Thursday, the US Geological Survey reported, but seismologists said while it was widely felt it was too deep to cause much damage.

The quake hit some 62 kilometers (39 miles) from the Eastern Highlands provincial capital Goroka and 324 kilometers from the national capital Port Moresby at a depth of 105 kilometres.

Scientists analyzing the surface of a giant asteroid are puzzling over bright spots that represent some of the purest materials seen so far by a NASA spacecraft.

NASA on Wednesday released new images of the asteroid Vesta taken by the orbiting Dawn spacecraft that show some places on the surface twice as bright as others.

Russian authorities said Wednesday they planned to start cleaning up toxic waste that was illegally dumped near a town after outraged residents appealed to the Kremlin.

A chemical company dumped 163 tons of carbon tetrachloride in an abandoned asphalt plant near the small town of Balezino in the Udmurtia region of central Russia.