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.

Bulgaria has imposed a four-year ban on fishing for sturgeon on the River Danube and in its Black Sea waters, the farming ministry said Tuesday.

The restrictions cover four sturgeon species, all threatened with extinction, and was prompted by the need to protect their populations and align Bulgaria's rules with a 10-year ban imposed in 2006 across the Danube in Romania, it said.

Malaysian wildlife authorities said they had rescued a pygmy elephant calf on Borneo island and expressed hope a planned sanctuary would provide protection for the endangered animals.

The male calf, which is less than a month old, was pulled out of a deep moat surrounding a palm oil plantation in remote Sabah state on Friday, said Sen Nathan, a senior official with the Sabah Wildlife Department.

A potent solar flare has unleashed the biggest radiation storm since 2005 and could disrupt some satellite communications in the polar regions, U.S. space weather monitors said Monday.

The event started late Sunday with a moderate-sized solar flare that erupted right near the center of the Sun, said Doug Biesecker, a physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Prediction Center.

Scientists in Britain and Japan have unveiled a fast-track way towards breeding crops with higher yields or resistance to climate change.

Early beneficiaries should be Japanese farmers who need salt-loving rice plants after their fields were submerged in last year's tsunami.