Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, will be buried at sea, a family spokesman said Thursday.

"I suspect it will be a private service," spokesman Rick Miller told Agence France Presse.

New Zealand's High Court on Friday dismissed a challenge launched by climate change sceptics against a government research agency's finding that the temperature had risen in the past century.

The court backed the science that led the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) to conclude that New Zealand's climate warmed almost one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) between 1909 and 2009.

Deforestation may cause rainfall in the Amazonian basin to decline disastrously, British scientists said in a study published on Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Rainfall across the vast basin could lessen by 12 percent during wet seasons and 21 percent during dry seasons, potentially inflicting astronomical costs on farmers and reducing hydro-electricity output from receding river flows.

Bottom trawling is dramatically altering the ocean floor and harming habitats, similar to the way that farming has permanently changed the landscape, a study said on Wednesday.

Much has been written about trawling's indiscriminate destruction of fish stocks, but a team of marine scientists in Spain, writing in the journal Nature, said some of its practices damaged the fabric of the ecosystem.

Two International Space Station crew members on Wednesday successfully completed a spacewalk to install a new power switching unit, the U.S. space agency NASA said.

American Sunita Williams and Japan's Akihiko Hoshide had to contend with a sticky bolt that prevented them from completing the installation in a previous spacewalk last week.

Scientists using a high-powered telescope in Chile have discovered an ancient star that seems oddly impervious to aging.

The star is in a globular cluster dating back to the universe's distant past, but new images from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile show that one of the stars still has a considerable amount of lithium.

Staple food prices may double within the next two decades due to climate change and an increase in extreme weather including droughts and hurricanes, the anti-poverty group Oxfam said Wednesday.

Oxfam warned current climate change research isn't taking into account extreme weather events, which it warned could also temporarily send up prices by a similar amount.

Natto, the Japanese breakfast dish of fermented soybeans, has a smell likened to sweaty feet but researchers have come up with an unlikely way of making it less whiffy -- using bacteria from Chinese dust clouds.

Microscopic organisms found in the yellow fug that drifts over from China are almost identical to the reagent usually added to the beans to start the decomposition process, said Teruya Maki, an assistant professor at Kanazawa University.

NASA's Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is nearing the edge of the solar system and may already be "dancing on the edge" of outer space, the scientists behind the project said Tuesday.

In a lecture marking the approaching 35th anniversary of the Voyager project, Ed Stone said it could be "days, months or years" before it finally breaks into interstellar space.

A memorial service for Neil Armstrong, the U.S. astronaut who became the first human being to set foot on the moon, will be held in the U.S. capital Washington on September 13, NASA said Tuesday.

NASA chief Charles Bolden, present and former astronauts and other dignitaries are expected to attend the ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral in honor of Armstrong, who died on August 25 at the age of 82.