The 2010 earthquake that devastated southern Haiti may have opened a new era of seismic activity and residents should brace for more massive temblors, said a US study on Thursday.

The 7.0 quake that killed 250,000 people and leveled much of the capital Port-au-Prince, was of a magnitude unseen on the island since the 18th century, said the study in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America.

The quest to create nuclear fusion may have come a step closer when scientists heated solid matter to two million degrees with the world's most powerful X-ray laser, a study reported Wednesday.

A team of researchers working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California used the rapid-fire laser -- a billion times brighter that any other man-made X-ray source -- to flash-heat a miniscule piece of aluminum foil.

A Cleveland Clinic women's health specialist has made a house call at the zoo to demonstrate how to fit an orangutan with a newer brand of implanted birth-control device.

The Plain Dealer reports (http://bit.ly/xTqClI ) the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo's Kitra is the first orangutan in North America to get the device called Implanon. It's about 1 ½ inches long, slightly thicker than pencil lead and meant for humans.

The U.S. space agency said Thursday its Kepler space telescope mission has confirmed 26 new planets outside our solar system, all of them orbiting too close to their host stars to sustain life.

Scattered across 11 planetary systems, their temperatures would be too hot for survival, as they all circle their stars closer than Venus, the second planet from the Sun, which has a surface temperature of 464 Celsius (867 F).

Scientists in the United States reported a further step towards a celebrated "invisibility cloak" by masking a large, free-standing object in three dimensions.

The lab work is the latest advance in a scientific frontier that uses novel materials to manipulate light, a trick that is of huge interest to the military in particular.

The Russian cargo ship Progress M-14M was launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early Thursday, bringing water and fuel to the International Space Station, the mission control center said.

Progress was successfully launched at 05:06 Thursday (2306 GMT Wednesday) carrying some 2.6 tons of mainly water and fuel, Russian news agencies cited the Russian control centre as saying.

Coastlines, working patterns, and even the country's most famous meal are under threat from climate change, Britain said Thursday in its first-ever national assessment of the likely risks.

The 2.8 million pound ($4.4 million) study sets out the most pressing problems expected to affect the United Kingdom as a result of climate change, from rising sea levels to more frequent summer droughts.

Solar radiation from a massive sun storm -- the largest in nearly a decade -- collided with the Earth's atmosphere on Tuesday, prompting an airline to reroute flights and sky watchers to seek out spectacular light displays.

U.S. carrier Delta Air Lines said it had adjusted flight routes for transpolar journeys between Asia and the United States to avoid problems caused by the radiation storm, a spokesman said.

Archaeopteryx, a winged dinosaur long believed to be the world's first bird, had black feathers, according to a scientific feat reported on Tuesday.

The color of skin and feathers is one of the big unknowns about dinosaurs, and it is left to the imagination of artists, rather than scientists, to depict how these enigmatic creatures looked.

A British animal rights group demanded Tuesday that Indonesia end trade in endangered long-tailed macaques, releasing video footage and images of men removing the monkeys from the wild.

The video released by the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) shows several men capturing the monkeys in the jungle in central Java's Yogyakarta region, bagging and then cramming them into small crates and cages.