For city grasshoppers, noise just isn't cricket.

Loud traffic drowns out the song the male grasshopper makes, rubbing a toothed file on his hind legs against a protruding vein on his front wings, to lure a mate.

Thai customs officers have seized hundreds of cobras being smuggled through the country for use in traditional medicine as a supposed sexual aid, an official said Wednesday.

The 600 deadly wild snakes were discovered in crates on a truck when it was stopped at a checkpoint in the south of the country.

A jury including the literary provocateur Michel Houellebecq on Wednesday handed out a prize dubbed the "Goncourt for pets" to a novel about a hunt gone wrong.

"The Hunting Party" by 42-year-old Agnes Desarthe tells of a young man who is injured during a hunt, and while he awaits rescue falls into "conversation" with a wild rabbit about the meaning of life -- both animal or human.

Indian authorities investigating a rape case say a sprinter who won a women's relay gold medal at the 2006 Asian Games is actually a man.

Police charged Pinki Pramanik on Monday with raping and assaulting a woman she was living with in the eastern state of West Bengal. The woman alleged Pramanik was a man who had reneged on a promise to marry her.

Try as we might, there's no escaping death. Art collector Richard Harris has decided to embrace that fact and wants the rest of us to do the same.

The retired Chicago print dealer has spent years acquiring works imbued with mortality, from 18th-century anatomical drawings to Tibetan skull masks and papier-mache skeletons from Mexico.

A popular New Year's celebration that draws thousands of tourists to the tiny North Carolina town of Brasstown for a party that ends in a "possum drop" may no longer be held there, a judge ruled.

The 18-year tradition in the town of 240 consisted of lowering the animal to the ground at midnight in a see-through cage decked out in Christmas garlands, like the ball that is dropped in New York's Times Square -- except the possum is alive.

Smugglers transported millions of contraband cigarettes around Bulgaria in coffins and even hired hearses to throw investigators off the scent, the country's customs chief said on Tuesday.

Head of the Bulgarian customs agency Vanyo Tanov told state BNT television the smugglers also disguised some vehicles as ambulances.

Baboons in Cape Town are being paintballed to drive them out of residential suburbs and stop them from pillaging homes and cars on brazen food raids, an official said Tuesday.

The animals are shot by monitors who shadow the city's several primate troops, which are notorious for causing havoc in areas bordering their natural mountain habitat.

Britain's media are in a meltdown and its government is gaffe-prone, so Oxford Dictionaries has chosen an apt Word of the Year: "omnishambles."

Oxford University Press on Tuesday crowned the word — defined as "a situation that has been comprehensively mismanaged, characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations" — its top term of 2012.

Some of the locks at the Tower of London -- home to Queen Elizabeth II's crown jewels -- have had to be changed after two sets of keys were stolen from the grounds, red-faced officials said on Monday.

Police have launched an investigation after an intruder gained access to the site of the historic castle in the early hours of November 6 before stealing the keys.