Natural gas power generation should be prioritized to help tackle South Africa's dire energy crisis that has hobbled growth and led to rolling black-outs, said a report released Tuesday.

Africa's second biggest economy relies on coal for most of its electricity and has plans to expand its nuclear capacity.

Boxing gloves raised, two orangutans enter a ring at a Thai zoo, a spectacle that fascinates locals and foreigners alike but sits increasingly at odds in a nation slowly embracing animal welfare.

Every morning hundreds of tourists visit Safari World, a large zoo on the outskirts of Bangkok, to see apes perform a show parodying human behavior -- in particular our predilection for violence, sex and alcohol.

SpaceX said Monday it has delayed by a couple of months the return to flight of its Falcon 9 rocket, following an explosion on the way to the space station in June.

The company's chief executive, Elon Musk, had said previously that the rocket would launch no earlier than September, after a failed strut was blamed for the rocket's demise just minutes after takeoff on June 28 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

Italy's Enel Green Power said Monday it had won the right to sell power supply contracts for 553 MW in Brazil and would be investing $600 million (533 million euros) in three new plants.

"We are extremely pleased about this landmark win, thanks to which we became the number one company in the Brazilian solar industry," said Enel Green Power (EGP) head Francesco Venturini in a statement.

President Barack Obama will change the name of North America's tallest mountain peak from Mount McKinley to Denali, the White House said Sunday, bestowing the traditional Alaska Native name on the eve of a historic presidential visit to Alaska.

By renaming the peak Denali, an Athabascan word meaning "the high one," Obama is wading into a sensitive and decades-old conflict between residents of Alaska and Ohio. Alaskans have informally called the 20,320-foot (6,194-meter) mountain Denali for years, but the federal government recognizes its name evoking the 25th president, William McKinley, who was born in Ohio and assassinated early in his second term.

The National Zoo's panda parents, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, have another son.

The zoo announced Friday that the surviving panda cub is male and the son of the zoo's male panda Tian Tian. Mei Xiang gave birth to fraternal twins Saturday, but the smaller cub — also a male fathered by Tian Tian — died Wednesday.

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.