SCIENCE

Russia set forth an ambitious space strategy where the country plans to send Russian cosmonauts to the surface of the moon, send unmanned probes to Jupiter and Venus and build a network of research stations on Mars and the Russian space agency plans to do these by 2030.

Floods and powerful cyclones will remain as features of the Australian weather in the current century but scientists warned that scorching heat waves will also intensify in the decades ahead, no thanks to the worsening global warming.

The ordinary garden snail is now being recruited into the military as hi-tech spies. Scientists have turned the snail into a data-gathering cyborg spy that will gather and transmit intelligence back to its handler on a military base. It may sound like a plot to a Hollywood movie but it's actually happening in a research lab in New York.

The threat of big asteroids hitting Earth has made for entertaining Hollywood movie fare but as NASA astronomers discover more asteroids that could spell real-life Armageddon for Earth could there be a way to save the planet from these gigantic cosmic killers? Turns out that Hollywood had the solution all along as scientists found that a well-placed nuclear explosion could actually save humanity from a big asteroid hitting Earth.