Controversy over a leading U.S. reproductive health group supplying fetal tissue for research has focused attention on a little-discussed aspect of science.

Some of the organization's affiliates in the U.S. provide the tissue, according to the pro-choice group, Planned Parenthood. An anti-abortion group says the Planned Parenthood is illegally making a profit from that, and has released covertly recorded videos about it.

Fat needs its place alongside the basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami because it evokes unique sensations, U.S. researchers said in a new study.

The sixth flavor should be known as "oleogustus," a combination of oily and taste in Latin, according to Purdue University scientists who published their study in the journal Chemical Senses.

Threatened by the advance of a desert that already covers two-thirds of Niger, the poor Sahel nation hopes to halt rapid deforestation by promoting natural gas.

Giant billboards, media ads starring local celebrities and door-to-door campaigns extol the virtues of gas and alert people to the ecological dangers of unchecked deforestation.

Russia on Wednesday set a date for the first Proton rocket launch since an engine failure in May saw a Mexican satellite destroyed.

Authorities said a Proton-M rocket would blast off from the Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan on August 28 carrying a British Inmarsat-5F3 commercial communications satellite. 

The last of the wild horses on Great Abaco island in the Bahamas has died, prompting caretakers to collect tissue for possible cloning and hopefully bring back a viable population.

Milanne Rehor, project director for the Wild Horses of Abaco Preservation Society, said Tuesday that a U.S. veterinarian removed tissue from the dead mare and the material has just been shipped to an animal cloning technology company in Austin, Texas.

NASA's discovery of Earth-like exoplanet Kepler-452b, nicknamed "Earth 2.0", has social media buzzing about the chances of finding a faraway world, possibly with alien life or key resources such as water.

Science or fiction? The experts respond.

Australia's humpback populations have recovered so well from years of devastating whaling that they could be delisted as a threatened species in a conservation success story scientists Tuesday hailed as "a symbol of hope".

Humpback whales were commercially harvested around the Australian coast between 1912 and 1972, with tens of thousands of the animals killed, decimating the species.

Sea storm surges amplified by heavy rain are a greater flood threat to U.S. coastal cities than previously understood, and are occurring more frequently according to a study published Monday.  

The number of such "compound" events "has increased significantly over the past century," said a paper in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Climate Change.

Hillary Clinton was set to lay out an ambitious plan Monday to invest in solar and other renewable energy sources if elected president, drawing a contrast with her fossil fuel-loving Republican rivals.

The Democratic front-runner was to speak at 1500 GMT at the main bus station in Des Moines, Iowa where she has been campaigning since Saturday.

Thousands of solar panels glint in the sun, but the prized farmland beneath lies barren. While the Italian island of Sardinia revels in a renewable energy boom, the long arm of organised crime risks sullying its clean power ambitions.

Famed for its lush plains and emerald waters but racked by poverty and unemployment, Sardinia has jumped at the chance to boost the economy by converting its long months of sunshine into green energy.