Japan's population is expected to shrink to a third of its current size over the next century, with the average woman living to over 90 within 50 years, a government report said Monday.

The population is forecast to decline from the current 127.7 million to 86.7 million by 2060 and to tumble again to 42.9 million by 2110 "if conditions remain unchanged", the health and welfare ministry said in the report.

The arid plains fringing Australia's desert center are more suited to camels than blooms of coral but there, hundreds of miles from the coast, a piece of the Great Barrier Reef has been put on ice.

Suspended in a liquid nitrogen chamber of minus-196 degrees Celsius (-320 Fahrenheit), the 70 billion sperm and 22 billion coral embryos are part of an ambitious Australian-first project to preserve and perhaps one day regenerate the world-famous reef.

It was the talk of Davos, grabbing the imagination of a forum otherwise shrouded in gloom: a miracle machine that cracks the code of life within hours and could revolutionize healthcare.

Patients will no longer have to wait weeks to know if they have cancer and their doctors will know immediately what kind of disease they have, allowing them to target therapies precisely and to avoid harmful delays or mistakes.

An asteroid about the size of a bus shaved by Earth on Friday in what space watchers described as a "near-miss," though experts were not concerned about the possibility of an impact.

The asteroid, named 2012 BX34, measured between six and 19 meters in diameter (20 to 62 feet), said Gareth Williams, associate director of the U.S.-based Minor Planet Center which tracks space objects.

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.