Australian scientists mapping the Great Barrier Reef have discovered corals at depths never before thought possible, with a deep-sea robot finding specimens in waters nearly as dark as night.

A team from the University of Queensland's Seaview Survey announced the unprecedented discovery 125 meters (410 feet) below the surface at Ribbon Reef, near the Torres Strait and at the edge of the Australian continental shelf.

A six-member salvage team was lowered Wednesday onto an oil rig that ran aground in Alaska to assess options as the U.S. Coast Guard vowed to prevent any ecological threat, officials said.

The team spent three hours on board the oil giant Shell's Kulluk mobile drilling unit after an improvement in weather conditions, which had prevented any such operation since the rig's grounding on New Year's Eve.

Hong Kong conservationists expressed outrage Thursday after images of a factory rooftop covered in thousands of freshly sliced shark fins emerged, as they called for curbs on the "barbaric" trade.

The southern Chinese city is one of the world's biggest markets for shark fins, which are used to make soup that is an expensive staple at Chinese banquets and viewed by many Asians as a rare delicacy.

Radiation in space might harm the brains of astronauts in deep space by accelerating the development of Alzheimer's disease, a new study on mice suggests.

The research reveals another risk that manned deep-space missions to places such as Mars or the asteroids could pose, scientists added.

This year has been a busy one for space missions, and it looks like next year will ramp things up even more.

Though NASA has retired its space shuttles, astronauts and cosmonauts are still launching regularly on Russian rockets to the International Space Station, and will continue to do so. Plus, China is planning another manned docking mission for 2013, and many more countries, such as South Korea, India, Canada and a coalition of European nations, will launch robotic science probes next year.

High seas and strong winds prevented crews from boarding an oil drilling ship to check for any damage after the large vessel went aground off an uninhabited island in the Gulf of Alaska.

A Coast Guard plane and a helicopter flew over the Kulluk on Tuesday, but severe weather did not permit putting marine experts on board the drilling rig, which had grounded on a sand and gravel beach in stormy seas.

Iran aims to set up the country's first dark sky area on an island in the Persian Gulf to promote astronomical research and tourism.

Iran's English-language state Press TV quotes the director of Iran Sky Party, Hooman Najafi, as saying Wednesday the so-called dark sky park — an area kept free of artificial light pollution to promote astronomy and stargazing — will be established on Qeshem, the biggest Iranian island in the Gulf.

Thousands of bathers enjoying the hot New Year's Day weather on Australia's Bondi Beach fled the water on Tuesday after a shark alert was sounded.

The crowded sea was cleared in a matter of minutes after authorities raised the alarm when a surf patrol boat said it had seen what it thought could have been a large shark.

Nobel medicine laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, a neurologist and developmental biologist, died Sunday at her home in Rome aged 103, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

She was the oldest living Nobel laureate at the time of her death.

Two centuries after the French people beheaded Louis XVI and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood, scientists believe they have authenticated the remains of one such rag kept as a revolutionary souvenir.

Researchers have been trying for years to verify a claim imprinted on an ornately decorated calabash that it contains a sample of the blood of the French king guillotined in Paris on January 21, 1793.