Ecuador's Tungurahua volcano spewed lava and towering plumes of ash Tuesday but the alert level remains the same, seismic experts said.

"During the overnight and early morning hours, there continued to be a series of explosive events and signs of quaking and (lava) emission," said a statement from the Geophysical Institute in Quito, capital of the Andean nation.

A growing majority of Americans think global warming is occurring, that it will become a serious problem and that the U.S. government should do something about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.

Even most people who say they don't trust scientists on the environment say temperatures are rising.

An assassin slit the throat of Egypt's last great pharaoh at the climax of a bitter succession battle, scientists said Monday in a report on a 3,000-year-old royal murder.

Forensic technology suggests Ramses III, a king revered as a god, met his death at the hand of a killer, or killers, sent by his conniving wife and ambitious son, they said.

Two NASA probes crashed into the moon on Monday after spending months gathering data by orbiting miles above the lunar surface, the U.S. space agency said.

The site where the tiny probes, dubbed Ebb and Flow, crashed will be named after astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

Researchers say a pair of fossils unearthed in the hills north of Las Vegas belonged to a saber-toothed cat.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that a team from California's San Bernardino County Museum identified the fossils dug up in June as being front leg bones from the extinct predator.

Ebb and Flow chased each other around the moon for nearly a year, peering into the interior. With dwindling fuel supplies, the twin NASA spacecraft are ready for a dramatic finish.

On Monday, they will plunge — seconds apart — into a mountain near the moon's north pole. It's a carefully choreographed ending so that they don't end up crashing into the Apollo landing sites or any other place on the moon with special importance.

A Soyuz spacecraft atop a towering rocket was placed into launch position Monday at Russia's manned-space facility in the freezing, windswept steppes of Kazakhstan ahead of a five-month mission for three astronauts to the International Space Station.

The craft was rolled out of its hangar on a flatbed train at exactly 7 a.m. in strict accordance with tradition and crawled for two hours at a walking pace to the launch pad. Colleagues, friends and relatives of the astronauts withstood temperatures as low as minus-30 C (minus-22 F), worsened by wind, to watch the procedure.

A mega-quake in 1255 that wrecked the Nepalese capital, wiped out a third of the population of Kathmandu Valley and killed the country's monarch, King Abhaya Malla, was of a kind that may return to the Himalayas, seismologists reported on Sunday.

Experts from Nepal, France and Singapore mapped deposits of river sediment displaced along part of the fault line where the Indian subcontinent slams into the Asia tectonic plate at up to 50 millimeters (1.97 inches) per year.

The roar of chainsaws has replaced birdsong, the once-lush, green jungle scorched to a barren grey. The equivalent of six football pitches of forest is lost every minute in Indonesia.

The disappearance of the trees has pushed thousands of animals -- from the birds they harbor and sustain to orangutans, gibbons and black panthers -- out of their natural homes and habitats.

A major report on climate change being compiled by the United Nation's climate science panel was on Friday leaked online in what appeared to be an attempt by a climate sceptic to discredit the panel.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the full draft of its Fifth Assessment Report, which is not set for official publication until next September, had been published online by one of 800 experts contributing to the report.