Russian and South Korean scientists signed a deal Tuesday on joint research intended to recreate a woolly mammoth, an animal which last walked the earth some 10,000 years ago. The deal was signed by Vasily Vasiliev, vice rector of North-Eastern Federal University of the Sakha Republic, and controversial cloning pioneer Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation. Hwang was a national hero until some of his research into …

Kajal Agarwal is sitting pretty these days as she has plum projects in Tamil with Vijay and Suriya and in Telugu cinema too in addition to a Bollywood film with Akshay Kumar. Sources close to the actress say that she is working harder than ever to justify the faith the film makers have shown in her. Currently, she is learning Russian because her character in KV Anand's Maatran with Suriya has to speak the language. An instructor was flown in from …

A Russian Proton-M rocket completed the successful launch Saturday of an advanced Chinese communications satellite that should help expand television coverage in parts of Southeast Asia. The Roscosmos space agency said the AsiaSat 7 satellite was placed in its designed orbit after being launched from the Baikonur space centre in ex-Soviet Kazakhstan. The mission was accomplished after a recent string of Russian space failures that included the …

Russia on Thursday announced its scientists had for the first time made contact with its stranded Mars probe Phobos-Grunt, a day after the European Space Agency said it had received a signal. "A signal from the probe has been received and some telemetry data. At the moment our specialists are working on this information," the Interfax news agency quoted Russian space agency spokesman Alexei Kuznetsov as saying. Interfax said the signal was received …

Three astronauts on Tuesday landed safely in the Kazakh steppe aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule after a stay of over five months aboard the International Space Station, Russian mission control said. American Mike Fossum, Japan's Satoshi Furukawa and Russia's Sergei Volkov touched down outside the remote settlement of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan just before sunrise after undocking from the ISS earlier in the day. "It has landed," said a message flashed …

Two Russians and an American Monday blasted off for the International Space Station (ISS) on a Russian rocket from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Geo News reported. The initial stages of the lift-off went smoothly and a textbook launch would be a boost for Russia, whose space programme has been hit by the loss of half a dozen satellites over the last year due to faulty launches. "Everything is normal and we are feeling fine," the crew …

Six volunteers Friday will emerge blinking into the outside world after spending almost one-and-a-half-years in isolation at a Russian research centre to test the effects on humans of a flight to Mars. The six men, who have spent 520 days in a capsule in a car park outside the Moscow institute, will at 1000 GMT open the hatch of their module that slammed shut on June 3, 2010, before being taken for a barrage of medical tests. The experiment simulated …

Libya's new rulers said on Thursday they would prosecute the killers of ousted dictator Moamer kadhafi following the international outcry over the circumstances of his death. "With regards to Kadhafi, we do not wait for anybody to tell us," said Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, vice chairman of the ruling National Transitional Council at a news conference in Benghazi. "We had already launched an investigation. We have issued a code of ethics in handling of prisoners …

A Russian Soyuz rocket successfully blasted off from French Guiana on Friday bearing the first two satellites in Europe's Galileo global positioning system, a much-heralded mission that will redraw commercial competition in space. The launch from Europe's space base in South America was the first time that Soyuz, which first flew in 1966 and traces its roots back to the earliest Cold War intercontinental ballistic missiles, has taken off from outside …

Three astronauts returned safely to Earth from the International Space Station on Friday aboard a Soviet-era capsule whose mission follows an unprecedented spate of Russian space accidents. Space officials said the Soyuz TMA-21 capsule landed on its side in the wind-swept steppes of the ex-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan at 0400 GMT. "A bulls-eye landing for the Soyuz TMA-21," a NASA commentator said in a live video feed while Russian mission control …