The Swedish government said Friday it had asked the European Union to block the import of live American lobster, in a bid to avoid contamination of its native species.

Mexican officials late Thursday lifted a four-day air pollution alert in the nation's densely-populated capital after ozone levels dropped to acceptable levels.

Mexico City authorities issued the first air pollution alert in 14 years due to high ozone levels, restricting traffic, encouraging children to stay indoors and ordering factories to cut emissions.

NASA said it will test the effects of a large fire in space by setting off a blaze inside an orbiting unmanned space craft.

NASA has set off tiny controlled fires in space in the past, but never tested how large flames react inside a space capsule in space.

Scientists in Chile have created a chicken embryo that developed dinosaur-like feet after genetic manipulation, highlighting the evolutionary link between theropod dinosaurs and birds.

The research -- published last week in the journal Evolution -- shows that "by inhibiting early maturation of a leg of the chicken embryo, the leg reverts to the shape that dinosaurs' legs had," said Alexander Vargas, one of the six researchers at the University of Chile.

The U.N. aviation agency called Tuesday for regulations on space travel to be enacted within five years in order to bolster a burgeoning space tourism and transportation sector.

The International Civil Aviation Organization "recognizes that sub-orbital and outer space flights will foster new tourism and transport markets, and that investments in related research and development remain at a very healthy level," ICAO Council President Olumuyiwa Benard Aliu said.

Two robotic spacecraft on Monday began a seven-month journey to Mars as part of a European-Russian unmanned space mission to sniff out leads to life on the Red Planet. 

Russia's Proton rocket carrying the spacecraft launched into an overcast sky at the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in the Kazakh steppe at 0931 GMT according to plan, the Russian space agency Roscosmos and the European Space Agency (ESA) said. 

A South Korean Go grandmaster on Sunday scored his first win over a Google-developed supercomputer, in a surprise victory after three humiliating defeats in a high-profile showdown between man and machine.   

Lee Se-Dol thrashed AlphaGo after a nail-biting match that lasted for nearly five hours -- the fourth of the best-of-five series in which the computer clinched a 3-0 victory on Saturday. 

Europe and Russia are set to launch an unmanned spacecraft Monday to smell Mars' atmosphere for gassy evidence that life once existed on the Red Planet, or may do so still.

ExoMars 2016, the first of a two-phase Mars exploration, will see an orbiter hoisted from Kazakhstan at 0931 GMT Monday on a Russian Proton rocket.

Is Africa ready to take on the war against malaria, HIV, Ebola and the like? Not yet, said some of the continent's brightest scientific minds at a landmark gathering this week in Senegal.

Israel said it transferred an ailing lion from the impoverished and blockaded Gaza Strip to a Palestinian zoo in the West Bank on Thursday.

The lion was taken from a zoo in Rafah to the Erez crossing into Israel, said COGAT, a defense ministry body which coordinates Israeli activity in the Palestinian territories.