The head of NASA appealed to Congress on Friday to put more money into restoring America's ability to send astronauts into space instead of relying on Russian rockets.

In an open letter, published in Wired magazine and titled "Don't Make Us Hitch Rides With Russia. Love, NASA," Charles Bolden said the U.S. government has essentially funded Moscow instead of pouring money into its own aerospace industry back home.

As the reality of global warming starts to hit home, people may ask: "How will it affect my livelihood?"

Well, that depends. 

Six people shut themselves inside a dome for a year in Hawaii on Friday, in the longest U.S. isolation experiment aimed at helping NASA prepare for a pioneering journey to Mars.

The crew includes a French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans -- a pilot, an architect, a doctor/journalist and a soil scientist.

Russia on Friday successfully launched a Proton rocket with a British satellite in the first such launch since an engine failure in May resulted in a Mexican satellite being destroyed.

A Proton-M rocket carrying an Inmarsat-5 F3 communications satellite launched from Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1144 GMT as scheduled, Russia's space agency said.

A hundred prominent artists, academics and public figures signed a combative climate change manifesto released Thursday calling for an end to "climate crimes" and the era of fossil fuels.

Desmond Tutu, Noam Chomsky, Vivienne Westwood and a raft of lesser-known luminaries summoned a grassroots movement to force radical change in the global economy, comparing the cause to the fights against slavery, colonialism and apartheid.

Mandatory water-saving measures in place to fight California's historic drought have produced a sizeable drop in consumption over the past two months, regulators said Thursday.

The measures have been far reaching and the U.S. state's 38 million residents are only allowed to water their lawns on specific days and have been asked to use water-saving hoses, even though it is the height of another punishing summer.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that countries must "accelerate the rhythm of negotiations" on capping global warming ahead of an international climate conference in Paris in December.

"We don't have much time. There remain less than 100 days before the final negotiations," he said, following a meeting with Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in the French capital.

Sea levels are rising around the world, and the latest satellite data suggests that three feet (one meter) or more is unavoidable in the next 100-200 years, NASA scientists said Wednesday.

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than ever, and oceans are warming and expanding much more rapidly than they have in years past.

In half a century of space travel more than 500 people have glimpsed the Earth from the unique vantage point of the cosmos, yet no black African has been among them.

Now a Nigerian and two South Africans are in a race to become the first after being shortlisted in a global talent search to send a "young icon of the future" into the heavens.

Under attack from hordes of ravenous starfish, Pacific coral is getting help from an unexpected source -- seaweed, an arch enemy, researchers said on Wednesday. 

Seaweed is no friend of the fragile ecosystems of coral reefs, pumping out harmful chemicals, blocking out life-giving sunlight, and rubbing up against and damaging the threatened marine invertebrates.