Deforestation of Brazil's Amazon has slowed for a fourth consecutive year to its lowest rate since authorities began monitoring the world's largest rainforest, officials said Tuesday.

The National Institute of Space Research found that the Amazon lost 4,656 square kilometers (1,797 square miles) of rain forest over a period running from August 2011 to July 2012, 27 percent less than the previous year.

A group of American scientists met in Tokyo on Tuesday to study last year's Fukushima nuclear accident in hopes of finding lessons to improve the safety of U.S. atomic power reactors.

Norman Neureiter, head of the 22-member committee of the National Academy of Sciences, said the tsunami-spawned disaster at Fukushima nuclear power plant and its continuing impact have caused widespread concerns about the safety of nuclear energy.

China on Tuesday "successfully" launched a European-made telecommunications satellite into orbit aboard a Chinese rocket, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The satellite, made by Thales Alenia Space, will provide telecommunications services for customers in Asia, Africa and Europe, the report said, but did not name them.

Researchers have found bacteria thriving beneath ice, in the dark and without oxygen in a lake in Antarctica, pushing the boundaries of what was thought necessary to sustain life on Earth.

It is an extreme environment that also could exist elsewhere in our solar system, suggesting the possibility of conditions for life to exist somewhere that is not this planet.

Australia's native animals are being fed nauseating sausages of cane toad meat in a bid to train them against eating the foul, toxic species as it spreads into new areas, researchers said Tuesday.

Cane toads, a warty, leathery creature with a venom sac on their heads toxic enough to kill snakes and crocodiles, are advancing across north-western Australia at a speed of 50 kilometers (31 miles) a year.

The U.S. defended its track record on fighting climate change on Monday at U.N. talks, saying it's making "enormous" efforts to slow global warming and help the poor nations most affected by it.

Other countries have accused Washington of hampering the climate talks ever since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty limiting emissions of heat-trapping gases by industrialized countries. As negotiators met for a two-week session in oil and gas-rich Qatar, U.S. delegate Jonathan Pershing suggested America deserves more credit.

An army of rice-grain-sized beetles, attracted by warming weather, has moved into Canada's western forests, where its tree massacre is causing the mercury to rise yet further, a study said Sunday.

The voracious horde of mountain pine beetles has invaded about 170,000 square kilometers (65,000 square miles) -- a fifth of the forest area of British Columbia, Canada's western-most province, a research team wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Rising acidity is eating away the shells of tiny snails, known as "sea butterflies", that live in the seas around Antarctica, leaving them vulnerable to predators and disease, scientists said Sunday.

The study presents rare evidence of living creatures suffering the results of ocean acidification caused by rising carbon dioxide levels from fossil fuel burning, the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement.

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen's three-mast ship Maud, long abandoned in the Canadian Arctic ice, will be salvaged and repatriated mid-2013, a Norwegian group announced Sunday.

The group, which plans to return the old polarship to Norway to be the centerpiece of a new museum, is this week in Cambridge Bay in Canada's far north filming and photographing the shipwreck trapped in ice.

Nearly 200 nations launched a fresh round of United Nations climate talks in Doha on Monday faced with appeals for urgency in their efforts to reduce Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions.

The 18th U.N. climate conference comes amid a welter of scientific warnings that extreme weather events like super-storm Sandy will become commonplace if mitigation efforts fail.