NASA successfully launched twin spacecraft at 8:52 p.m. EDT on Wednesday (0052 GMT Thursday) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, according to NASA TV.

A senior Chinese space program official said on Wednesday in Beijing that development of the Shenzhou VII manned spacecraft is proceeding smoothly, but declined to give a timetable for its launch.

China still has no definite timetable for making big planes, but is on the way of feeder plane manufacture, said a senior official on Wednesday.

NASA's long-lived Mars Exploration Rover Spirit will finish its 1,000th Martian day Thursday, continuing a successful mission originally planned for 90 Martian days.

Zoologists from both United States and China will hopefully join efforts to build an animal AIDS pathological model, according to a news report released on October 24.

China's secondary vocational training schools plan to enroll eight million students in 2007, up 500,000 from the previous year, said an official with the Ministry of Education.

People are able to test whether they are infected with AIDS virus at home by using samples of urine or saliva, thanks to a kind of new AIDS reagent produced by Chinese enterprises.

The U.S. researchers from the University of Georgia reported Tuesday they have found that the common wood duck and laughing gull are very susceptible to highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza viruses and have the potential to transmit them.

UCLA radiologists and Siemens Medical Solutions have developed remote-control software that enables an off-site imaging expert to operate a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine via the Internet.

Brazil on Monday celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first public manned flight of a self-powered heavier-than-air object, which was achieved by a Brazilian.