Mexican forensic expert Alejandro Hernandez dips dry, yellowish cadavers in a see-through bath, hoping his technique to rehydrate mummified bodies will solve murders in crime-infested Ciudad Juarez.

The city bordering Texas has endured drug-related violence and a wave of murders of women in recent years, with bodies dumped anywhere and drying up quickly in the desert climate, complicating the task of identifying victims and their cause of death.

The Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower and the Kremlin -- along with a slew of other landmarks around the world -- went dark Saturday to draw attention to climate change.

In a symbolic show of support for the planet, people across the continents switched off their lights for 60 minutes -- all at 8:30 pm local time -- to make "Earth Hour."

Reports of a flash of light that streaked across the sky over the U.S. East Coast appeared to be a "single meteor event," the U.S. space agency said. Residents from New York City to Washington and beyond lit up social media with surprise.

"Judging from the brightness, we're dealing with something as bright as the full moon," Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office said Friday. "We basically have (had) a boulder enter the atmosphere over the northeast."

An orphaned Alaska polar bear is getting a new temporary home in Buffalo, N.Y.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say the 3- to 4-month old cub is expected to be transported to the Buffalo Zoo sometime this spring to join the zoo's own cub, Luna.

The next book by primatologist Jane Goodall has been postponed because some passages were lifted from online sources and not properly credited.

Hachette Book Group announced Friday that no new release date has been set for Goodall's "Seeds of Hope," originally scheduled for April 2.

Sydney's skyline plunged into darkness on Saturday as the city cut its lights for the "Earth Hour" campaign against climate change, kicking off an event which will travel around the globe.

Organizers expect hundreds of millions of people across some 150 countries to turn off their lights for 60 minutes on Saturday night -- at 8:30pm local time -- in a symbolic show of support for the planet.

New rock dating techniques have helped narrow the timeframe of a chain of massive volcanic eruptions that wiped out half the world's species 200 million years ago, a study said Thursday.

The result is the most precise date yet -- 201,564,000 years ago -- for the event known as the End-Triassic Extinction, or the fourth mass extinction, said the study in the journal Science.

A new examination of what is essentially the universe's birth certificate allows astronomers to tweak the age, girth and speed of the cosmos, more secure in their knowledge of how it evolved, what it's made of and its ultimate fate.

Sure, the universe suddenly seems to be showing its age, now calculated at 13.8 billion years — 80 million years older than scientists had thought. It's got about 3 percent more girth — technically it's more matter than mysterious dark energy — and it is expanding about 3 percent more slowly.

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday unveiled the most detailed map yet of relic radiation from the Big Bang, revealing new data it hopes will shed light on the creation and expansion of our Universe.

The 50-million pixel, all-sky image of the oldest light adds an edge of precision to some existing cosmological theories, defining more precisely the composition of the Universe and its age -- about 80 million years older than previously thought.

China's coastal waters are suffering "acute" pollution, with the size of the worst affected areas soaring by more than 50 percent last year, an official body said.

The State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said 68,000 square kilometers (26,300 square miles) of sea had the worst official pollution rating in 2012, up 24,000 square kilometers on 2011.