Chile's Atacama desert may seem to contain little besides red-grey rocks and sand -- but scientists are busy searching here for clues to life in a place it much resembles: Mars.

This desert in northern Chile, like the red planet, is hot, dusty and extremely dry.

Most people look for a place to hide when a typhoon is on the horizon, but Atsushi Shimizu hopes that the fury of nature may one day help resource-poor Japan tackle its energy woes.

As thousands of Australians seek shelter from a "monster" cyclone battering the country's northern coast, the Tokyo-based engineer believes that his bladeless wind turbine can not only stand up to the raw force of these destructive storms, but also harness that power to generate electricity.

An "unprecedented" 21 different types of dinosaur tracks have been found on a stretch of Australia's remote coastline, scientists said Monday, dubbing it the nation's Jurassic Park. 

Palaeontologists from the University of Queensland and James Cook University said it was the most diverse such discovery in the world, unearthed in rocks up to 140 millions years old in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

A French and an American astronaut floated outside the International Space Station Friday for a spacewalk to upgrade the orbiting outpost for the arrival of future space crews.

The spacewalk by France's Thomas Pesquet, 39, and American Shane Kimbrough, 49, officially began at 7:24 am (1124 GMT) when the duo switched their spacesuits to internal battery power.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a law that said manned missions to deep space, including to Mars, would be the U.S. space agency's main goal in the decades to come.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef may never recover from last year's warming-driven coral bleaching, said a study that called for urgent action in the face of ineffective conservation efforts.

SpaceX on Thursday successfully launched a communications satellite into space from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The company's Falcon 9 rocket blasted off at 2 am (0600 GMT) carrying the EchoStar XXIII, a commercial communications satellite for EchoStar Corporation.

A British-owned cruise ship has smashed into and damaged pristine coral reefs in a remote corner of Indonesia known as one of the world's most biodiverse marine habitats, researchers and officials said Tuesday.

Potatoes on Mars? Scientists are reporting promising results growing the tuber under conditions that mimic the Red Planet in an experiment in Peru linked to US space agency NASA.

Stargazers applauded as they were plunged into darkness Sunday when the moon passed in front of the sun in a spectacular "ring of fire" eclipse.

Astronomers and enthusiasts in Argentina were among the first to see the so-called annular eclipse as it crossed South America shortly after 1200 GMT, on course for Africa.