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A 70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton from the Gobi Desert that was smuggled to the United States in pieces and auctioned for more than $1 million was returned on Monday by the U.S. government to Mongolia. The huge Tyrannosaurus bataar's skull was on display at a repatriation ceremony near the United Nations in New York, where officials of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan and the U.S. Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) formally turned over the nearly complete skeleton to Mongolian officials.   Mongolia demanded the return of the 8-foot-tall (2.4 meter), 24-foot-long (7.3 meter), mostly reconstructed cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex last year after commercial paleontologist Eric Prokopi sold it at a Manhattan auction last spring for $1.05 million. Prokopi, based in Gainesville, Florida, bought and sold whole and partial fossilized dinosaur skeletons. U.S. authorities filed charges against Prokopi in October and seized the skeleton, which is comprised of f

NASA plans to send two astronauts aboard the International Space Station out on a spacewalk on Saturday to try to fix an ammonia leak in a cooling system on one of the station's solar arrays, the U.S. space agency said on Friday. _0"> The crew spotted a steady stream of small, white frozen ammonia flakes floating away from a coolant line outside the orbital outpost on Thursday. Mission managers reviewed images and data gathered overnight and said on Friday they tentatively planned to send American astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn out on Saturday morning to try to stop the leak by replacing a pump on the cooling system. "The crew is not in danger, and the station continues to operate normally otherwise," NASA said in a news release.   Ammonia is used to cool the power systems that operate the solar arrays, which provide electricity to the station. Each of the eight solar arrays has its own independent cooling system. The leak is on the far left si

A pair of spacewalking astronauts wrapped up a hastily planned repair job on Saturday to replace a suspect coolant pump needed to keep the International Space Station at full power. NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Tom Marshburn put on spacesuits and left the space station's airlock shortly before 9 a.m. EDT to attempt to stem an ammonia coolant leak that cropped up on Thursday.   Over the next four hours, they installed a spare pump, then positioned themselves to check for signs of escaping ammonia ice crystals when the system was turned back on. "No flakes," Cassidy reported to flight controllers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Engineers will monitor the system over the next several days and beyond to make sure the pump replacement fixed the problem. "We certainly have come a long way in identifying a potential source," said NASA mission commentator Rob Navias as the astronauts returned to the station's airlock. The entire spacewalk lasted

A melt of ice on Greenland and Antarctica is likely to be less severe than expected this century, limiting sea level rise to a maximum of 69 cm (27 inches), an international study said on Tuesday. Even so, such a rise could dramatically change coastal environments in the lifetimes of people born today with ever more severe storm surges and erosion, according to the ice2sea project by 24, mostly European, scientific institutions.   Some scientific studies have projected sea level rise of up to 2 meters by 2100, a figure that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called a worst case that would swamp large tracts of land from Bangladesh to Florida. Ice2sea, a four-year project to narrow down uncertainties of how melting ice will pour water into the oceans, found that sea levels would rise by between 16.5 and 69 cm under a scenario of moderate global warming this century. "This is good news" for those who have feared sharper rises, David Vaughan, of the British Antarctic

The U.S. government believes a Chinese missile launch this week was the first test of a new interceptor that could be used to destroy a satellite in orbit, one U.S. defense official told Reuters on Wednesday. China launched a rocket into space on Monday but no objects were placed into orbit, the Pentagon said on Wednesday. The object re-entered Earth's atmosphere above the Indian Ocean.   "We tracked several objects during the flight but did not observe the insertion of any objects into orbit and no objects associated with this launch remain in space," said Lieutenant Colonel Monica Matoush, a Pentagon spokeswoman. The rocket reached 10,000 km (6,250 miles) above Earth, the highest suborbital launch seen worldwide since 1976, according to Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. China has said the rocket, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in western China, carried a science payload to study the earth's magnetosphere

After more than 15 years of failures by scientists around the world and one outright fraud, biologists have finally created human stem cells by the same technique that produced Dolly the cloned sheep in 1996: They transplanted genetic material from an adult cell into an egg whose own DNA had been removed. The result is a harvest of human embryonic stem cells, the seemingly magic cells capable of morphing into any of the 200-plus kinds that make up a person. The feat, reported on Wednesday in the journal Cell, could re-ignite the field of stem-cell medicine, which has been hobbled by technical challenges as well as ethical issues.   Until now, the most natural sources of human stem cells have been human embryos, whose use in research poses ethical quandaries. The technique announced on Wednesday, by scientists at Oregon Health & Science University and the Oregon National Primate Research Center, uses unfertilized human eggs. Eliminating the need for human embryos could boost

President Barack Obama learned on Monday what can happen to presidents caught up in allegations of scandal: they have to address them instead of anything else. It happened when the president had to interrupt his news conference with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain to answer questions about the widening investigation into the Benghazi attacks in Libya and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups.   By the end of the day he was facing a third major problem when the Associated Press said the Department of Justice had secretly seized some of its reporters' phone records last year. It is all leading to comparisons with the second term of President Bill Clinton, in which his agenda was severely disrupted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Obama, unlike Clinton, has not been accused of personal misconduct. But his ability to steer the Washington "conversation" could be compromised. "I think the IRS scandal comes at