Millions of Americans gazed in wonder through telescopes, cameras and disposable protective glasses Monday as the moon blotted out the sun in the first full-blown solar eclipse to sweep the U.S. from coast to coast in nearly a century.

On Monday, when a total solar eclipse sweeps across the United States for the first time in 99 years, people gathering in Charleston, South Carolina, will be the last on the continent to experience it.

A dragon eating the Sun. Make that a giant toad. A demon. No, a vampire! 

Depending on which ancient society you were part of, these were among the ravenous monsters blamed whenever the life-giving star at the center of our existence disappeared behind the Moon for a full solar eclipse.

U.S. researchers have successfully carried out gene editing on human embryos using the revolutionary technique known as CRISPR, the first time the procedure has been performed in the U.S., a report said Thursday.

"The effort, led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health and Science University, involved changing the DNA of a large number of one-cell embryos with the gene-editing technique CRISPR, according to people familiar with the scientific results," the MIT Technology Review said.

A small green sponge discovered in dark, icy waters of the Pacific off Alaska could be the first effective weapon against pancreatic cancer, researchers said Wednesday.

The Moon, long thought to be a dry, inhospitable orb, hosts surprisingly large sub-surface water reserves, which one day may quench the thirst of lunar explorers from Earth, scientists said Monday.

Our Sun is much like other stars, and not an anomaly because of its magnetic poles that flip every 11 years, scientists said Thursday.

Three Siberian tigers rescued in Lebanon from an attempt to smuggle them into war-ravaged Syria were being resettled to France on Tuesday, an animal rights group said.

The White House has championed a new era of U.S. leadership in space, but its aspirations are complicated by tight budgets, vacancies in top posts and the rising role of private industry in aerospace innovation, experts say.

During a speech Thursday at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Vice President Mike Pence delighted hundreds of space agency employees and contractors by pledging that "under President Trump, we will achieve more in space than we ever thought possible," including a "return to the Moon" and "American boots on the face of Mars."

European scientists said Thursday they have discovered a new subatomic particle containing a never-before-seen combination of quarks -- the most basic building blocks of matter.