Three astronauts from the United States, Russia and Japan on Friday successfully completed a rare nighttime landing on Earth in the wintry Kazakh steppe after returning from the International Space Station.

"They have landed safely and the recovery team have found them. Everything is according to plan," a spokesman for Russian space agency Roscosmos told AFP.

Scientists have invented a machine that imitates the way the human brain learns new information, a step forward for artificial intelligence, researchers reported Thursday.

The system described in the journal Science is a computer model "that captures humans' unique ability to learn new concepts from a single example," the study said.

A conservation group slammed Japan Thursday for fueling illegal ivory trading and smuggling through poor law enforcement.

The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) ran an undercover probe that found traders in Japan were willing to dodge rules on ivory sales to move it across borders, including to major market China where elephant tusks are highly prized.

A monkey-eating eagle has been hatched in captivity in the Philippines, boosting the critically-endangered giant bird's fight against extinction.

Found only in the rapidly vanishing tropical rainforests of the Philippines, the meter- (3.3-foot) long raptor gets its name from its diet of macaque monkeys and other small animals that share its habitat in Mindanao, the country's main southern island.

The first litter of puppies conceived through in vitro fertilization has been born, in a scientific breakthrough decades in the making, U.S. researchers announced Wednesday.

A female dog into which 19 embryos were transferred gave birth in July to seven healthy puppies, according to the researchers from Cornell University.

Japan's space agency said Wednesday its "Akatsuki" probe had successfully entered into orbit around Venus after an initial attempt at reaching the second planet from the sun failed five years ago.

The success marks the first time a Japanese space probe has entered into the orbit of another planet, according to Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).

Russia has lost communication with a newly developed military satellite after it apparently failed to separate from the booster rocket after its launch, a source in the country's air and space forces told TASS state news agency on Monday. 

"The spacecraft... is recognized as lost since it is impossible to use it according to its purpose," the source said, adding that a repeat attempt to separate the satellite from the upper-stage rocket was unsuccessful.

High winds in Florida have pushed to Sunday Orbital ATK's launch of its unmanned Cygnus cargo ship to the International Space Station, the latest in a series of delays due to weather.

The next launch bid will begin at 4:44 pm (2144 GMT) on Sunday, with the opening of a 30-minute launch window, NASA said.

A ship carrying 25 tons of radioactive waste arrived back in Australia on Saturday, met by activists who warned against the vast nation becoming a nuclear dumping ground.

About a dozen Greenpeace protesters, some carrying signs such as "Don't waste Australia", stood near the entrance to Port Kembla south of Sydney as the BBC Shanghai arrived in a well-policed operation.

British astronaut Tim Peake on Friday said he will be taking part in the London marathon -- harnessed to a running machine 400 kilometers above Earth on the International Space Station.

"As soon as I got assigned to my mission to the International Space Station, I thought wouldn’t it be great to run," said Peake, a former helicopter pilot who will be running for the Prince's Trust charity.