India will Monday launch the first stage of its domestic satellite navigation network which will eventually provide services both to civilians and the military and is similar to the U.S. Global Positioning System, officials said.

The first of seven satellites will be carried into space as part of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), just months after China inaugurated its own domestic satellite navigation system.

Marine scientists have called on New Zealand to immediately ban fishing in waters inhabited by the world's rarest dolphin, saying that losing just one more of the creatures will threaten the species' existence.

The Maui's dolphin is one of the world's smallest, with a maximum length of 1.7 meters (5.5 feet), prompting conservationists to call it "the hobbit of the sea".

NASA scientists said Friday they were testing a prototype of a robot the U.S. space agency hopes to send to Mars in 2020 in Chile's Atacama desert.

NASA hopes to use this kind of rover to explore life-friendly sites found by Curiosity, the rover already searching for signs of life on Mars. It has been there since last August.

A new fiber optic technology could increase Internet bandwidth capacity by sending data along light beams that twist like a tornado rather than move in a straight line, scientists said Thursday.

The discovery comes as Internet data traffic is reaching its limit amid mounting demand for bandwidth by users of smartphones and Internet-enabled devices, creating problems for network providers.

The U.S. space agency launched a satellite late Thursday to unlock the secrets of the Sun's lower atmosphere.

NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph -- dubbed IRIS -- was launched at 0227 GMT aboard an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket off the California coast.

Scientists say they've figured out when our human ancestors first started throwing with accuracy and fire power, as only people can: Nearly 2 million years ago.

That's what researchers conclude in a study released Wednesday by the journal Nature. There's plenty of skepticism about their conclusion. But the new paper contends that this throwing ability probably helped our ancient ancestor Homo erectus hunt, allowing him to toss weapons — probably rocks and sharpened wooden spears.

Malaysia on Thursday stepped up pressure on Indonesia to do more to stop outbreaks of smog after fires on Sumatra island sparked Southeast Asia's worst air pollution crisis for years.

Palls of smoke from slash-and-burn agricultural fires pushed haze levels to record highs in Singapore last week, shrouding the city in smog, and badly affected parts of Malaysia.

Scientists on Wednesday said they had unravelled the DNA of a horse that lived some 700,000 years ago, a record-breaking feat in the young field of palaeo-genomics.

The ancient find indicates that all horses today, as well as donkeys and zebras, shared a common ancestor that lived some four million years ago, twice as early as thought.

Renewables like solar and wind represent the fastest-growing source of energy power generation and will make up a quarter of the global power mix by 2018, the International Energy Agency said in a report Wednesday.

The IEA said that in 2016 renewable energy will overtake natural gas as a power source and will be twice that of nuclear, and second only to coal as a source of power.

The world's first space conversation experiment between a robot and humans is ready to be launched.

Developers from the Kirobo project, named after "kibo" or hope in Japanese and "robot," gathered in Tokyo Wednesday to demonstrate the humanoid robot's ability to talk.