The International Space Station is dodging a softball-sized piece of space junk.

Mission Control told astronauts to fire the station's engines briefly Friday morning to avoid a piece of an old communications satellite.

There are simple, inexpensive ways to cut back on two major pollutants -- soot and methane -- and taking action now could slow climate change for years to come, international scientists said Thursday.

When it comes to fending off global warming, the focus often is on harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels in coal plants and car engines that linger in the atmosphere for many decades, said the study in Science.

The world's newest snake has menacing-looking yellow and black scales, dull green eyes and two spiky horns. And it's named after a 7-year-old girl.

Matilda's Horned Viper was discovered in a small patch of southwest Tanzania about two years ago and was introduced last month as the world's newest known snake species in an issue of Zootaxa.

The Milky Way is home to far more planets than previously thought, boosting the odds that at least one of them may harbor life, according to a study released.

Not long ago, astronomers counted the number of "exoplanets" detected outside our own solar system in the teens, then in the hundreds. Today the tally stands at just over 700.

With voices hardly louder than an insect's buzz, the tiniest frogs ever discovered are smaller than a coin and hop about the rainforest of the tropical island of Papua New Guinea, U.S. scientists said Wednesday.

Not only are these little peepers with the big names -- Paedophryne amauensis and Paedophryne swiftorum -- the smallest frogs known to man, they are also believed to be the smallest vertebrates on Earth, said the report in the science journal PLoS ONE.

China on Wednesday released six young captive pandas into semi-wild enclosures as part of a project aimed at helping the endangered bears adapt to the wild and eventually go free.

Previous attempts by Chinese authorities to release pandas into the wild have proved unsuccessful. The last bear that was set free in 2006 was found dead after 10 months, apparently killed by wild pandas.

Global uncertainty on how to deal with the threats of nuclear weapons and climate change have forced the "Doomsday clock" one minute closer to midnight, leading international scientists said Tuesday.

"It is now five minutes to midnight," said Allison Macfarlan, chair of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which created the Doomsday clock in 1947 as a barometer of how close the world is to an apocalyptic end.

The ocean's deepest volcanic vents, kilometers below the surface, are teeming with life forms never before seen that thrive near super-hot underwater geysers, according to a new study.

Eyeless shrimps and white-tentacled anemones were photographed bunched around cracks in the ocean floor spewing mineral-rich water that may top 450 degrees Celsius (842 degree Fahrenheit), researchers reported on Tuesday.

An endangered Sumatran tiger found with serious arrow wounds all over its body was rescued from a wire trap in protected Indonesian jungle, officials said Tuesday.

The five-year-old male tiger was found on Monday in Bengkulu province on the lush island of Sumatra with nine arrow wounds estimated to be four days old, Bengkulu's conservation agency chief Supartono told Agence France Presse.

In fall 2009, the theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss gave a talk about recent discoveries in cosmology that he engagingly titled, "A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing."

The popularity of the video, viewed nearly a million times on YouTube, prompted Krauss to develop the ideas in the talk into this short, elegant account of the origins of the universe and its likely demise trillions of years from now.