A Norwegian family was flabbergasted to find that what appeared to be a piece of a meteorite had crashed through the roof of their allotment garden hut in the middle of Oslo, media reported Monday.

The rock weighing 585 grams (one pound, four ounces), which split in two, probably detached from a meteorite observed over Norway on March 1, experts said, and had landed on the empty hut in the Thomassen family's allotment in a working-class neighborhood of the Norwegian capital.

European and U.S. scientists said Monday that many meat-eating animals appear to lose their ability to taste sweet flavors over time, a finding that suggests diet plays a key role in evolution.

Most mammals are believed to possess the ability to taste sweet, savory, bitter, salty, and sour flavors, said researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center inP ennsylvania and University of Zurich, Switzerland.

An unusual opportunity to see two of the brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, appear to be right next to each other in the night sky is peaking in the next two days, astronomers said.

On a clear night from March 12-14, skywatchers may extend an arm and see the two planets look as though they are a couple fingers' width apart, or about three degrees, even though they are actually quite far from one another in space.

Russia's crisis-hit space agency intends to send its first manned mission to the Moon and deploy research stations on Mars under an ambitious plan presented to the government this month.

The Kommersant daily said the mission statement from the Roscosmos space agency through 2030 reveals no financial details but includes plans to find outside sources of funding that do not put additional pressures on the budget.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has landed robotic explorers on the surface of Mars, sent probes to outer planets and operates a worldwide network of antennas that communicates with interplanetary spacecraft.

Its latest mission is defending itself in a workplace lawsuit filed by a former computer specialist who claims he was demoted — and then let go — for promoting his views on intelligent design, the belief that a higher power must have had a hand in creation because life is too complex to have developed through evolution alone.

F. Sherwood Rowland, the Nobel prize-winning chemist who sounded the alarm on the thinning of the Earth's ozone layer and crusaded against the use of man-made chemicals that were harming earth's atmospheric blanket, has died. He was 84.

Rowland died Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar of complications from Parkinson's disease, the dean of the University of California, Irvine's physical sciences department said Sunday.

China may send its first woman into space this year after including female astronauts in the team training for its first manned space docking, state media said Monday.

Three astronauts will blast off on board Shenzhou ("Divine Vessel") IX between June and August to conduct a manual docking with the Tiangong-1 module currently orbiting the Earth, Xinhua news agency said, quoting an official with China's manned space program.

Plant scientists on Sunday said they had bred a strain of wheat that thrives in saline soils, boosting the quest to feed Earth's growing population at a time of water stress and climate change.

Durum wheat with a salt-loving gene had yields which were up to 25 percent greater than ordinary counterparts, according to trials carried out in highly saline fields.

The Greenland ice sheet is more sensitive to global warming than thought, for just a relatively small -- but very long term --temperature rise would melt it completely, according to a study published on Sunday.

Previous research has suggested it would need warming of at least 3.1 degrees Celsius (5.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels, in a range of 1.9-5.1 C (3.4-9.1 F), to totally melt the ice sheet.

When Manuel Montesa takes sheep out to forage in mountains in northern Spain, he must bring water for them because streams near his town have run dry.

Like the rest of Spain, his home region of Aragon is suffering its worst drought in decades. It has left crops struggling to grow, caused pastures to dry up and forced farmers to leave land untilled.