Ahead of her first nude ocean swimming race, 43-year-old Sydney mother Jo Davison was a little nervous.

Willpower apparently can be bought. The chance to win or lose US$20 a month enticed dieters in a yearlong study to drop an average of 9 pounds (4 kilograms) — four times more weight than others who were not offered dough to pass up the doughnuts.

The London zoo is taking stock of an animal you don't often find behind bars, launching what it says is the first interactive map of the British capital's domestic cats.

Creating a “superbrain” of connected minds, scientists on Thursday said they had enabled a rat to help a fellow rodent while the animals were a continent apart but connected through brain electrodes.

Giving inmates drug substitution treatment, needles and condoms are key ways to help curb addiction and HIV infection in European jails, experts say, calling on authorities to change their approach to prison health care.

A nonprofit foundation wants to recruit a man and a woman — possibly a married couple — for a bare-bones, 501-day journey to Mars and back that would start in less than five years, project organizers said on Wednesday.

A 114-year-old Japanese woman, the daughter of a kimono maker, was formally recognized Wednesday as the world's oldest woman.

Big Bird is back as a player in big time U.S. politics.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity, dispatched to learn if the planet ever had ingredients for life, drilled its first bit of powder from inside a potentially water-formed ancient rock, scientists said on Wednesday.

A Texas mother had a one-in-70-million kind of Valentine's Day this year when she gave birth to two sets of identical twin boys, a Houston hospital announced on Monday.