Lion bones have become a hot commodity for their use in Asian traditional medicine, driving up exports from South Africa to the East and creating new fears of the survival of the species.

Conservationists are already angry over lion trophy hunting.

The United States Air Force planned a key test Tuesday of an experimental aircraft designed to fly at six times the speed of sound, which is about 3,600 mph (6,000 kph).

The unmanned X-51 WaveRider was expected to reach Mach 6 after being dropped by a B-52 bomber and taking flight off the Southern California coast near Point Mugu. Engineers hoped the X-51 would sustain its top speed for five minutes, twice as long as it's gone before, NBC reported.

The Bicknell's thrush, a rare songbird that breeds atop mountains in the northeastern United States and winters in the Caribbean, is being considered for endangered species status, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Tuesday.

The sparrow-sized brown bird, which nests at elevations over 3,000 feet (914 meters) in New York, Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, has one of the most limited breeding and wintering ranges of any bird in North America. The main threat to the bird is climate change that's reducing its boreal mountain habitat of spruce and fir forest, said Mollie Matteson of the Center for Biological Diversity in Richmond, Vermont.

NASA's newest rover Curiosity has yet to make its first move on Mars, but scientists said Tuesday they are already mapping out possible driving routes to a Martian mountain.

Since landing in Gale Crater near the equator last week, the nuclear-powered rover has been busy getting a head-to-wheel health checkup while parked. It touched down about 5 miles (8 kilometers) from Mount Sharp where signatures of past water have been spotted at the base.

India plans to launch a space probe that will orbit Mars, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh confirmed on Wednesday after press reports that the mission was scheduled to begin late next year.

The project would mark another step in the country's ambitious space program, which placed a probe on the moon three years ago and envisages its first manned mission in 2016.

Anthropologists have dealt a blow to theories that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred, bequeathing humans today with some of the genetic legacy of their mysterious cousins.

Over the last two years, several studies have suggested that H. sapiens got it on with Neanderthals, an enigmatic hominid who lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for up to 300,000 years but vanished some 30-40,000 years ago.

Genetic mutations have been found in three generations of butterflies from near Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, scientists said Tuesday, raising fears radiation could affect other species.

Around 12 percent of pale grass blue butterflies that were exposed to nuclear fallout as larvae immediately after the tsunami-sparked disaster had abnormalities, including smaller wings and damaged eyes, researchers said.

An African elephant in Vienna Zoo has been impregnated using frozen sperm from a male living in the wild, in what the Zoo said Monday was a world first.

Pregnancy has been achieved before elsewhere using frozen sperm in two cases, once with an African elephant and once with an Asian one, but both times the males were in captivity and the fetuses died, a zoo spokeswoman told Agence France Presse.

U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday ribbed scientists behind NASA's roving robot Curiosity, instructing them to let him know right away if they found life on Mars.

"If in fact, you do make contact with Martians, please let me know right away," Obama joked, as he called the scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California from Air Force One.

Bats in the bleachers of Olympic Stadium? Now there's an Olympic legacy to give many people nightmares.

But not Kim Olliver. Faced with the prospect of having bats take up residence in the girders of Olympic stadium, Olliver, the senior ecologist for the London Olympics, could barely contain her joy.