LOS ANGELES NASA is scrapping a controversial piece of hardware from its next-generation Mars rover that would have allowed the spacecraft to store rock fragments in a mini-basket for a future mission.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Astronauts up on the international space station faced the longest and hardest spacewalk of their mission Saturday, a seven-hour-plus excursion to wrap up repair work on a gummed-up joint.

LONDON Some advanced lung cancer patients already treated with chemotherapy might be able to skip some of the bad side effects of another series of chemo by taking a pill instead, a study suggests. An international study showed patients on Iressa, an expensive, newer targeted treatment, survived about as long as those on another course of chemotherapy.

WASHINGTON Two years after the government urged making HIV tests as common as cholesterol checks, there are small gains but still one in five people infected with the AIDS virus doesn't know it, scientists said Thursday.

WASHINGTON Winter looks likely to be mild in the Midwest and dry in the Southeast, the government said Thursday. Warmer-than-average temperatures are expected for the nation's center, especially Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

WASHINGTON Does a messy neighborhood make a difference on how people act? It sure does! Graffiti on the walls, trash in the street, bicycles chained to a fence, all resulted in a decline in how people behaved in a series of experiments.

SALT LAKE CITY Trouble-making zebra mussels have arrived in Utah. But not where they were expected to show up.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA couldn't have staged it any better: 10 people in orbit for Thursday's 10th anniversary of the world's most elaborate and expensive housing project, the international space station.

ATLANTA A little less "I'm Lovin' It" could put a significant dent in the problem of childhood obesity, suggests a new study that attempts to measure the effect of TV fast-food ads.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Spacewalking astronauts performed more repair work on a jammed joint at the international space station on Thursday, keeping a tight grip on all their tools so nothing would get away this time.

DETROIT Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, a cardiac surgeon who performed the nation's first human heart transplant and who also developed lifesaving medical implants, has died. He was 90. Kantrowitz died Friday in Ann Arbor of complications from heart failure, said his wife, Jean Kantrowitz.

MIAMI D'Zhana Simmons says she felt like a "fake person" for 118 days when she had no heart beating in her chest. "But I know that I really was here," the 14-year-old said, "and I did live without a heart."

HERODIUM, West Bank King Herod may have been buried in a crypt with lavish Roman-style wall paintings of a kind previously unseen in the Middle East, Israeli archaeologists said Wednesday. The scientists found such paintings and signs of a regal two-story mausoleum, bolstering their conviction that the ancient Jewish monarch was buried there.

WASHINGTON Bringing "Jurassic Park" one step closer to reality, scientists have deciphered much of the genetic code of the woolly mammoth, a feat they say could allow them to recreate the shaggy, prehistoric beast in as little as a decade or two.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand Researchers studying a rare and endangered species of penguin have uncovered a previously unknown species that disappeared about 500 years ago.

HOUSTON It's not easy holding on to a small bag some 200 miles above Earth.

LONDON Doctors have given a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs. "This technique has great promise," said Dr. Eric Genden, who did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. That operation used both donor and recipient tissue. Only a handful of windpipe, or trachea, transplants have ever been done.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. The astronaut who lost her tool bag on a spacewalk admitted Wednesday that she made a mistake by not checking to see if the sack was tied down, and said she's still smarting over the whole thing.

CHICAGO The dietary supplement ginkgo, long promoted as an aid to memory, didn't help prevent dementia and Alzheimer's disease in the longest and largest test of the extract in older Americans. "We don't think it has a future as a powerful anti-dementia drug," said Dr. Steven DeKosky of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, who led the federally funded study.

SYDNEY, Australia Taking a big hop forward in marsupial research, scientists say they have unraveled the DNA of a small kangaroo named Matilda. And they've found the Aussie icon has more in common with humans than scientists had thought. The kangaroo last shared a common ancestor with humans 150 million years ago.

WASHINGTON Cosmetic surgery patients who think facial fillers are a magical antidote to aging must be better informed of possible risks, government health advisers said Tuesday.

WASHINGTON Learning the name of a color changes the part of the brain that handles color perception.

TRENTON, N.J. As diabetes is rapidly becoming one of the world's most common diseases, its financial cost is mounting, too, to well over $200 billion a year in the U.S. alone, according to a new study.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. A spacewalking astronaut accidentally let go of her tool bag Tuesday after a grease gun inside it exploded, and helplessly watched as the tote and everything inside floated away.

WASHINGTON A stone-age burial in central Germany has yielded the earliest evidence of people living together as a family. The 4,600-year-old grave contained the remains of a man, woman and two youngsters, and DNA analysis shows they were a mother, father and their children.

WASHINGTON What was left of Dan Sivia's ankle simply didn't work. He limped through his 30s by sheer force of will, one foot almost completely immobile from repeated broken bones and surgeries. Then a doctor offered his last hope: An ankle replacement. A what? Sivia knew about hip, knee, even shoulder replacements. But ankles?

What's the healthiest city in America? It appears to be Burlington, Vt.

WASHINGTON If breast cancer runs in the family, women can be at high risk even if they test free of the disease's most common gene mutations, sobering new research shows. The genes BRCA1 and BRCA2 are linked with particularly aggressive hereditary breast cancer, and an increased risk of ovarian cancer, too.

GENEVA Fixing the world's largest atom smasher will cost at least 25 million francs ($21 million) and may take until early summer, its operator said Monday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Astronauts hitched a giant shipping crate full of home improvement "goodies" to the international space station on Monday, a critical step for boosting the population in orbit.

Vitamin C or E pills do not help prevent cancer in men, concludes the same big study that last week found these supplements ineffective for warding off heart disease.

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America's fattest and unhealthiest city explained why health is not a big local issue.

What's the healthiest city in America? It appears to be Burlington, Vt.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Space shuttle Endeavour closed in for a 220-mile-high linkup with the international space station on Sunday, hauling gear for a huge home makeover that will allow twice as many astronauts to live up there beginning next year.

NEW DELHI India rejoiced Saturday at joining an elite club by planting its flag on the moon as the country's space agency released the first pictures of the cratered surface taken by its maiden lunar mission.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. Space shuttle Endeavour's astronauts unfurled a 100-foot, laser-tipped pole and surveyed their ship for any launch damage Saturday while drawing ever closer to their destination, the international space station.

WASHINGTON Should preschool be more about ABCs or learning to play with others? With the help of Twiggle the Turtle, scientists found out that youngsters do better if they do both.

WASHINGTON Despite a nasty Martian dust storm, Spirit lives.

WASHINGTON The old moon has never looked this good. Mankind's first up-close photos of the lunar landscape have been rescued from four decades of dusty storage, and they've been restored to such a high quality that they rival anything taken by modern cameras.

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands A hobbyist with a metal detector struck both gold and silver when he uncovered an important cache of ancient Celtic coins in a cornfield in the southern Dutch city of Maastricht.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. NASA fueled space shuttle Endeavour on Friday for an evening flight to the international space station and a home remodeling project by astronauts doubling as kitchen and bathroom installers. The weather was promising: Forecasters said there was just a 30 percent chance that rain or clouds would interfere with the 7:55 p.m. liftoff.

WASHINGTON Earth seems to have its first fuzzy photos of alien planets outside our solar system, images captured by two teams of astronomers. The pictures show four likely planets that appear as specks of white, nearly indecipherable except to the most eagle-eyed experts. All are trillions of miles away - three of them orbiting the same star, and the fourth circling a different star.

BEIJING A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns around the world and threatening health and food supplies, the U.N. reported Thursday.

WASHINGTON Federal health officials on Thursday ordered dozens of imported foods from China held at the border as possible health risks. Most are ethnic treats, including snacks, drinks and chocolates.

LONDON An increasing number of countries worldwide are making spreading HIV a crime, according to a new report from the International Planned Parenthood Federation.

ATLANTA For the first time, an expensive vaccine aimed at preventing cervical cancer in women has proven successful at preventing a disease in men, according to a study released Thursday by the vaccine's maker.

CHICAGO Not to put a damper on the Obama family's canine quest, but allergists have a news flash: There's no such thing as a hypoallergenic dog.

NEW YORK The same kind of deep brain stimulation used to treat some patients for Parkinson's disease also helped a few people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, French scientists reported.

BERLIN An American man who suffered from AIDS appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said.

NEW ORLEANS The controversial diabetes pill Avandia failed to significantly slow plaque buildup in heart arteries compared with an older drug, though there were some hopeful signs in a new study reported Wednesday.