The only thing interrupting one of New Mexico's most remote stretches of desert is a pristine runway where Virgin Galactic plans one day to launch the world's first commercial space-line.

But the runway has seen little use. No roar of jet engines. Just delayed promises of shuttling passengers to the edges of Earth.

The year 2014 was the hottest on record, "consistent" with a changing climate, the U.N.'s weather agency said Monday.

Average global air temperatures in 2014 were 0.57 degrees Celsius (1.03 degree Fahrenheit) higher than the long-term average of 14 C (57.2 F) in a 1961-1990 reference period, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in a statement.

Russia on Sunday carried out its first space launch of the year, using its commercial Proton rocket to send a British satellite into orbit.

The launch went ahead as planned just after 1230GMT from the Russia-owned Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, a live broadcast shown by Russia's Roscosmos space agency showed. It is expected to reach orbit at 0402GMT Monday.

Nepal's success in turning tiger-fearing villagers into their protectors has seen none of the endangered cats killed for almost three years, offering key lessons for an anti-poaching summit opening in Kathmandu on Monday.

Experts from conservation group WWF, which is co-hosting the conference with Nepal's government, said the Himalayan nation was a "tiger heavyweight" in the battle to fight poaching and protect them from extinction.

Nearly two dozen turtles that were stranded by cold weather last year in Massachusetts have successfully undergone rehab and have been returned to waters off Louisiana's coast.

More than 1,200 young, "cold-stunned" Kemp's ridley sea turtles were stranded in November and December.

Scientists who made headlines last March by announcing that they'd found long-sought evidence about the early universe are now abandoning that claim.

New data show that their cosmic observations no longer back up that conclusion, they say.

NASA has pushed back the launch of a satellite to study soil moisture to Saturday, so that it can perform "minor repairs" to the launch rocket.

"The launch of NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, which will produce the highest-resolution maps of soil moisture ever obtained from space, has been delayed to a targeted launch date of January 31," the U.S. space agency said on its website.

A mysterious and sometimes fatal brain disease that has afflicted children in northeastern India for years could be linked to a toxic substance in litchi fruits, US researchers said Thursday.

Investigators say more research is needed to uncover the cause of the illness, which leads to seizures, altered mental state and death in more than a third of cases.

Each year around this time, NASA honors fallen astronauts, including the 17 men and women killed in three separate wintertime accidents in the sky and on the earth.

For Robert "Hoot" Gibson, it's a time to remember lost friends and some of their stunts, like playing a saxophone in orbit.

Japan's government said it will launch a back-up spy satellite on Sunday, after cancelling an earlier lift-off due to bad weather.

Tokyo put spy satellites into operation in the early 2000s after its elusive neighbour North Korea fired a mid-range ballistic missile over the Japanese mainland and into the western Pacific in 1998.