Instead of a warm, wet and possibly life-bearing planet as some scientists contend, early Mars may have been a hostile and volatile place with frequent volcanic outbursts, a study said Sunday.

Earlier research had theorised that certain minerals detected on the surface of the Red Planet indicated the presence of clay formed when water weathered surface rock some 3.7 billion years ago.

Scientists in Switzerland and the United States on Sunday said they had created a "nano-velcro" textile that offers a swift, sensitive and low-cost way of detecting mercury, a toxic and accumulative pollutant, in water and fish.

The fibres are made out of gold nanoparticles that are coated with compounds called hexanethiol and alkanethiol, and bind to charged particles, also called ions, of heavy metal elements.

The boxy little white and blue vehicle draws plenty of curious stares as it chugs down the street. But this is no golf cart -- it's Gaza's first hand-built electric car.

It is the latest creation of Munther al-Qassas, a 32-year-old taxi driver from Gaza City who was looking for a novel way to get around as the tiny Palestinian enclave goes through its worst fuel crisis yet.

NASA's Curiosity rover has temporarily halted its journey across the surface of Mars as it tests the tools on its robotic arm, the U.S. space agency said Thursday.

The $2.5 billion craft -- which landed in Gale Crater on the Red Planet on August 6 -- has covered more than a football field's distance since it began trundling eastward.

Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, will be buried at sea, a family spokesman said Thursday.

"I suspect it will be a private service," spokesman Rick Miller told Agence France Presse.

New Zealand's High Court on Friday dismissed a challenge launched by climate change sceptics against a government research agency's finding that the temperature had risen in the past century.

The court backed the science that led the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) to conclude that New Zealand's climate warmed almost one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1909 and 2009.

Deforestation may cause rainfall in the Amazonian basin to decline disastrously, British scientists said in a study published on Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Rainfall across the vast basin could lessen by 12 percent during wet seasons and 21 percent during dry seasons, potentially inflicting astronomical costs on farmers and reducing hydro-electricity output from receding river flows.

Bottom trawling is dramatically altering the ocean floor and harming habitats, similar to the way that farming has permanently changed the landscape, a study said on Wednesday.

Much has been written about trawling's indiscriminate destruction of fish stocks, but a team of marine scientists in Spain, writing in the journal Nature, said some of its practices damaged the fabric of the ecosystem.

Two International Space Station crew members on Wednesday successfully completed a spacewalk to install a new power switching unit, the U.S. space agency NASA said.

American Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide had to contend with a sticky bolt that prevented them from completing the installation in a previous spacewalk last week.

Scientists using a high-powered telescope in Chile have discovered an ancient star that seems oddly impervious to aging.

The star is in a globular cluster dating back to the universe's distant past, but new images from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile show that one of the stars still has a considerable amount of lithium.