A suspected meteorite the size of a football plunged into a rice field in eastern India, startling farmers, authorities said Thursday.

Onlookers said the light brown-colored object sent them fleeing from the field when it fell at their rural village on Wednesday afternoon, sending up smoke.

A Chinese startup successfully launched the country's first commercial rocket capable of carrying satellites into orbit Thursday, as the space race between China and the US heats up.

Beijing-based Interstellar Glory Space Technology -- also known as iSpace -- said it launched two satellites into orbit around 1:00 pm Beijing time (0500 GMT) from Jiuquan, a state launch facility in the Gobi desert.

Microsoft on Monday announced a $1 billion investment in an OpenAI ethical artificial intelligence project backed by Tesla's Elon Musk and Amazon.

Fifty years ago on Saturday, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans in history to set foot on the Moon, an event watched on television by half a billion people.

India will make a new bid to launch a landmark mission to the Moon on Monday, a week after aborting lift-off at the last minute because of a fuel leak, officials said.

Russia launched a space telescope Saturday from the cosmodrome in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in a joint mission with Germany intended to map X-rays across the sky and replace a project lost in January.

The Bank of England on Monday said World War II code-breaker Alan Turing had been chosen to feature on the back of Britain's new £50 bank note ($63, 56 euros).

A 210,000-year-old skull has been identified as the earliest modern human remains found outside Africa, putting the clock back on mankind's arrival in Europe by more than 150,000 years, researchers said Wednesday.

Australian seagulls carry drug-resistant bacteria that could lead to serious infections in humans, researchers said Wednesday.

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