Liquid water has been observed on the planet Mars which makes it far more likely that life could be found there, the U.S. space agency NASA said Monday.

"Mars is not the dry, arid planet we thought of in the past," Jim Green, NASA's planetary science director, told a press conference.

India successfully launched Monday its first high-tech telescopes into space to study the stars, as New Delhi seeks to take another major step in its ambitious and low-cost space program.

A rocket carrying the 150-tonne mini space observatory called Astrosat, along with six foreign satellites, blasted off on schedule from India's main southern spaceport of Sriharikota.

Skygazers were treated to a rare astronomical event Sunday when a swollen "supermoon" and lunar eclipse combined for the first time in decades, showing the planet bathed in blood-red light.

The celestial show, visible from the Americas, Europe, Africa, west Asia and the east Pacific, will be the result of the sun, Earth and a larger-than-life, extra-bright moon lining up for just over an hour from 0211 GMT.

Global warming and evolution are reshaping the bodies of some American bumblebees, a new study finds.

The tongues of two Rocky Mountains species of bumblebees are about one-quarter shorter than they were 40 years ago, evolving that way because climate change altered the buffet of wildflowers they normally feed from, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Singapore's air quality worsened further reaching "hazardous" levels late Thursday as thick smog from forest fires on Indonesia's neighboring island of Sumatra choked the city-state.

Thick gray smoke blown in by southerly winds smothered the island, shrouding the skyline and creeping into homes, with many residents avoiding going outdoors.

For the first time in decades, skygazers are in for the double spectacle Monday of a swollen "supermoon" bathed in the blood-red light of a total eclipse.

The celestial show, visible from the Americas, Europe, Africa, west Asia and the east Pacific, will be the result of the Sun, Earth and a larger-than-life, extra-bright Moon lining up for just over an hour from 0211 GMT. 

Fossils from a unique plant-eating dinosaur found in the high Arctic of Alaska may change how scientists view dinosaur physiology, say Alaska and Florida university researchers.

A paper published Tuesday concluded that fossilized bones found along Alaska's Colville River were from a distinct species of hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur not connected to hadrosaurs previously identified in Canada and Lower 48 states.

A rare Sumatran rhino in Indonesia is pregnant with her second baby and expected to give birth in May, raising new hope for the critically endangered species, conservationists said Tuesday.

Only about 100 Sumatran rhinos are believed to exist in the entire world so the pregnancy is seen as tremendously good news for those trying to save the animals from extinction.

U.S. animal rights activists filed an unusual lawsuit on Tuesday on behalf of a macaque monkey who snapped selfie photographs, arguing it owned the photos rather than the nature photographer involved.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) filed the suit in federal court in San Francisco on behalf of six-year-old Naruto, seeking to have the macaque "declared the author and owner of his photograph."

An Irishman was extradited to the United States to face charges of trafficking in rhinoceros horns and faces five years in prison if guilty, U.S. prosecutors said Tuesday.

Patrick Sheridan is accused of using a "straw buyer" to purchase two black rhino horns from a taxidermist in Texas, prosecutors said. Sheridan and co-defendant and fellow Irishman Michael Slattery then took the horns to New York to sell on the black market.