The University of Maastricht in the Netherlands is awarding a doctorate to a researcher who wrote a paper on marriages between humans and robots.

David Levy, a British artificial intelligence researcher at the college, wrote in his thesis, "Intimate Relationships with Artificial Partners," that trends in robotics and shifting attitudes on marriage are likely to result in sophisticated robots that will eventually be seen as suitable marriage partners.

French archaeologists have discovered an 11,000-year-old wall painting underground in northern Syria which they believe is the oldest in the world.

©REUTERS/Handout

A view of a painting uncovered at Djade al-Mughara Neolihic site, northeast of the Syrian city of Aleppo, in this September 2007 handout photo.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- Gerhard Ertl of Germany won the 2007 Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for studies of chemical reactions on solid surfaces, which are key to understanding questions like why the ozone layer is thinning.

©Unknown

An artist's impression of the view of the Earth from the Moon if we could see in X-rays. The Earth is surrounded by an X-ray glow caused by particles from the Sun colliding with the gas trapped within the Earth's magnetic shield.

Scientists from the University of Leicester have taken an important first step in developing an innovative telescope which could one day be deployed on the Moon. The telescope is called MagEX, which stands for "Magnetosheath Explorer in X-rays" and is an international collaboration between scientists from the United States, the Czech Republic, and the University of Leicester. MagEX will study the magnetosheath, the magnetic "shield" that protects the Earth from the solar wind - the high energy particles that continuously flow out from the Sun. Without this shield, life on Earth as we know it could not exist.

Recent observations from NASA and Japanese X-ray observatories have helped clarify one of the long-standing mysteries in astronomy -- the origin of cosmic rays. Outer space is a vast shooting gallery of cosmic rays. Discovered in 1912, cosmic rays are not actually rays at all; they are subatomic particles and ions (such as protons and electrons) that zip through space in all directions at near-light speed, with energies tens of thousands of times greater than particles produced in Earth's largest particle accelerators.

©JAXA/ Takaaki Tanaka/HESS

This image from Japan's Suzaku X-ray observatory shows RXJ1713.7-3946. This supernova remnant is the gaseous remnant of a massive star that exploded. The remnant is about 1,600 years old. The contour lines show where gamma-ray intensity is highest, as measured by the High Energy Stereoscopic System (HESS) in Namibia.

Images from a NASA probe have shown that lightning does occur at the poles on Jupiter, a phenomenon previously only seen on Earth, a study released Tuesday said.

Lightning strikes had previously been observed at lower latitudes and around the equator on the gas planet but the jagged bolts of electricity had never been observed at either of its two poles, puzzling astronomers.

BARCELONA, Spain - When schoolchildren turn to the chapter on Christopher Columbus's humble origins as the son of a weaver in Genoa, they are not generally told that he might instead have been born out of wedlock to a Portuguese prince. Or that he might have been a Jew whose parents converted to escape the Spanish Inquisition. Or a rebel in the medieval kingdom of Catalonia.

France's Albert Fert and Germany's Peter Gruenberg won the 2007 Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for a breakthrough in nanotechnology that revolutionized data storage and led to gadgets such as laptops and iPods.

The 10-million Swedish crown ($1.54 million) prize, awarded by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, recognized the pair's discovery of giant magnetoresistance, which enables scientists to push huge amounts of data into ever-smaller spaces.

Japan plans to launch its first mission to land a spacecraft on the moon in the next decade, officials said on Tuesday, joining China and India in a race among Asian nations to explore the lunar surface.

Japan's first lunar orbiter is currently circling the moon, and the country is racing with China and India to land a craft on the lunar surface -- a feat so far achieved only by the former Soviet Union and the United States.

German researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied the chimp's choices by using an economic game with two players. In the game, a human or chimpanzee who receives something of value can offer to share it with another.