As animals evolve they tend to get larger over time, researchers concluded in a sweeping study released Friday that tracked thousands of creatures over a half-billion-year period.

The mean body size of marine animals, for example, increased 150-fold over the past 542 million years, according to the study published in the US journal Science.

Four times more sick and dying sea lion pups have gotten stranded on California beaches this year, and experts say unusually warm ocean water along the West Coast is to blame.

Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday about 940 sick and starving young sea lions have washed up on California beaches so far in 2015.

The start of a series of spacewalks to carry out major work at the International Space Station will be delayed by a day to Saturday so NASA can investigate a spacesuits problem.

"Space station managers decided Thursday to move the first two spacewalks by NASA's Expedition 42 commander Barry 'Butch' Wilmore and flight engineer Terry Virts by one day because of added analysis of spacesuits they will wear," said a NASA statement.

Earth's past, present and future come together here on the northern peninsula of Antarctica, the wildest, most desolate and mysterious of its continents.

Clues to answering humanity's most basic questions are locked in this continental freezer the size of the United States and half of Canada: Where did we come from? Are we alone in the universe? What's the fate of our warming planet?

With three complicated spacewalks planned in the coming days, NASA is rushing to resolve a spacesuit problem linked to a 2013 emergency when water dangerously flooded a European astronaut's helmet.

The spacesuits that will be worn by astronauts Barry Wilmore and Terry Virts on their ventures outside the International Space Station are in working order, NASA said Wednesday, but engineers are concerned about a recurring issue with a piece of equipment known as the fan pump separator, part of the spacesuit's temperature control system.

A physicist whose career was highlighted by research that helped capture moving images of the first moon walk has died. Ernest Sternglass was 91.

Cornell University says Sternglass died Feb. 12 of heart failure in Ithaca, New York.

A tiny minnow that lives only in backwaters in Oregon's Willamette Valley is the first fish to be formally removed from Endangered Species Act protection because it is no longer in danger of extinction, officials said Tuesday.

The recovery of the Oregon chub was formally announced by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Deputy Regional Director Richard Hannan.

Floral nectar contains a bouquet of natural chemicals that may help fight parasite infection in bumble bees, a study said Wednesday.

The findings throw up clues for helping honey bee colonies battling mysterious but catastrophic decline.

By the standards of outer space, it was the closest call yet recorded: a star that zoomed past our solar system 70,000 years ago at a distance of eight trillion kilometers, or five trillion miles.

An international team of astronomers said Tuesday the dim star probably passed through the solar system's distant cloud of comets, known as the Oort Cloud.

The tiny hut sculpted out of mud at the edge of the sea is barely large enough for Bokul Mondol and his family to lie down in. The water has taken everything else from them, and one day it almost certainly will take this, too.

Saltwater long ago engulfed the 5 acres where Mondol once grew rice and tended fish ponds, as his ancestors had on Bali Island for some 200 years. His thatch-covered hut, built on public land, is the fifth he has had to build in the last five years as the sea creeps in.