China launched its most powerful rocket ever on Thursday, state media said, as the country presses on with a program which has seen it become a major space power.

A Japanese rocket that fired a weather satellite into space on Wednesday was decked out in colorful manga in a bid to raise awareness among kids about the wonders of the universe.

The H-IIA rocket carrying the Himawari-9 weather satellite blasted into a cloudy sky at the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Kagoshima prefecture at 3:20 pm (0620 GMT).

Oil and gas production may have contributed to four of the five most powerful Los Angeles Basin earthquakes of the early 20th-century oil boom, a new study showed Monday.

Scientists said the Inglewood earthquakes in 1920, Whittier quakes in 1929, Santa Monica in 1930 and Long Beach in 1933 may have all been caused by oil activities.

Three astronauts landed safely in Kazakhstan Sunday following a 115-day mission aboard the the International Space Station, including U.S. astronaut Kate Rubins, the first person to sequence DNA in space.

Scientists in Brazil are preparing to release millions of factory-bred mosquitoes in an attempt to wipe out their distant cousins that carry tropical diseases. The insects' method: have sex and then die.

One of princess Aalia Sultana Babi's most prized possessions is a fossilized dinosaur egg she found an unsuspecting villager using to grind spices on her ancestral lands, an area billed as "India's Jurassic Park".

Biologist Colleen Handel saw her first black-capped chickadee with the heartrending disorder in 1998.

The tiny birds showed up at birdfeeders in Alaska's largest city with freakishly long beaks. Some beaks looked like sprung scissors, unable to come together at the tips. Others curved up or down like crossed sickles.

Mission controllers were in the dark Thursday about the fate of a tiny European craft despatched to Mars as a trial run for a rover to follow in a quest for life on the Red Planet.

The paddling pool-sized "Schiaparelli" lander was scheduled to touch down at 1448 GMT Wednesday after a scorching, supersonic dash through Mars' thin atmosphere to conclude a 496 million-kilometre (308 million-mile) journey from Earth.

Europe and Russia celebrated placing a robot explorer into Mars orbit on Wednesday, but ground controllers faced an anxious night searching for the tiny lander it had dispatched to the Red Planet's surface.

Long before the space age, Earthlings were already in hot pursuit of life on Mars, using primitive telescopes and even psychic mediums to seek evidence of sentient beings.