A Soyuz rocket lifted off on Friday on its maiden flight from Europe's space base here, carrying the first two satellites in the Galileo geopositioning system, an Agence France Presse reporter saw.

The launch -- the first by the veteran rocket beyond Russia's historic bases at Plesetsk and Baikonur -- is part of a commercial deal struck in 2003 to extend the range of Arianespace, which markets services from the European Space Agency (ESA) base in Kourou.

NASA on Wednesday set October 28 for its planned launch of a satellite to help weather forecasters predict extreme storms and offer scientists a better view of climate change.

The 1.5 billion dollar National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System Preparatory Project (NPP) is the first to measure both short and long term changes in weather and climate, the U.S. space agency said.

A retired satellite is hurtling toward the atmosphere and pieces of it could crash into the Earth as early as Friday, the German Aerospace Center says.

Scientists are no longer able to communicate with the dead German satellite ROSAT, which orbits the earth every 90 minutes, and experts are not sure exactly where pieces of it could land.

Europe's top court says patents cannot be filed on stem-cell research using cells from human embryos, a move many scientists say will harm future advances in medicine.

In a decision issued on Tuesday, the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg wrote that a process that involves taking a stem cell from a human embryo, resulting in its destruction, cannot be patented.

A South Korean team led by disgraced stem cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk is claiming to have cloned coyotes for the first time.

The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation said Monday that eight coyotes were born in June as part of its efforts to clone various species of animals in cooperation with South Korea's Gyeonggi Province.

The gleaming green schooner in Bremen's shipyard says everything about how Greenpeace has grown up through the years.

Three decades ago Greenpeace acquired a converted fishing trawler for $40,000, painted it green and set out to bump hulls with Japanese whalers and disrupt nuclear weapons testing; the first Rainbow Warrior was sunk by French intelligence agents in 1985.

A Tokyo radiation hotspot was not linked to the Fukushima nuclear crisis, Japanese authorities concluded Friday after finding old containers of radium powder likely used for luminous paint.

As researchers carry out more stringent tests to map how far contamination has spread from the crippled Fukushima atomic power plant, local media had widely suspected the radiation hotspot was created by fallout from the plant.

The iconic T. rex dinosaur grew bigger and faster than previously estimated, according to new methods based on actual skeletons instead of scale models, British and U.S. scientists said Wednesday.

Scientists digitally modeled flesh on five mounted T. rex skeletons and showed that the meat-eating lizard kings were up to a third bigger and grew two times as fast into adults than previous research had suggested.

Rare evidence of the long-held belief that humans are still evolving has been unearthed in the parish records of a French-Canadian island on the Saint Lawrence seaway, researchers say.

Ile aux Coudres is located 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Quebec City. Between 1720 and 1773, 30 families settled there and the population reached 1,585 people by the 1950s.

Three people scaled Sydney's iconic Opera House on Saturday, unfurling a bright yellow banner on its tiled white sails to protest against the destruction of forests.

Police said four people were arrested after the protest and were in custody.