The International Whaling Commission (IWC) on Friday demanded that Japan provide more information to prove that its revised Antarctic whaling programme was for scientific research, saying it could not reach a consensus based on documents submitted.

The British-based IWC had been expected to judge whether Japan's "NEWREP-A proposal", which would target 3,996 minke whales over 12 years, had addressed the issues that led to its predecessor being ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The world's most endangered feline species, the Iberian lynx, is making a comeback in Spain after being pushed to the brink of extinction.

But the costly efforts to reintroduce the spotted cat into the wild face an unexpected enemy -- cars.

The more oil and gas companies pump their saltwater waste into the ground, and the faster they do it, the more they have triggered earthquakes in the central United States, a massive new study found.

An unprecedented recent jump in quakes in America's heartland can be traced to the stepped up rate that drilling wastewater is injected deep below the surface, according to a study in Thursday's journal Science that looked at 187,570 injection wells over four decades.

Green technology to turn fog into fresh water straight from the tap has put an end to exhausting daily treks to distant wells by village women in southwest Morocco.

Families in five highland Berber communities have begun to benefit from "fog harvesting", a technique devised in Chile two decades ago and since taken up in countries from Peru to Namibia and South Africa.

Global police have seized "huge amounts" of wildlife contraband, including 12 tons of ivory, rhino horn and whale bones, in a massive operation across 62 countries, Europol said on Thursday.

"Operation COBRA III, the biggest ever coordinated international law enforcement operation targeting the illegal trade in endangered species, has led to the recovery of a huge amount of wildlife contraband," Europe's police agency said in a statement.

An excited crowd gathered in southwestern Romania to watch more than a dozen woolly brown bison stroll off lorries into the picturesque Tarcu mountains -- nearly 200 years after they became extinct in the region.

"I grew up hearing legends about bison that lived here and today we finally see them there," said 60-year-old teacher Elena Dragomir, watching the event near the village of Armenis with a group of her students.

The pilot of a solar-powered plane trapped in Japan by the country's rainy season said Thursday he is prepared to wait two more months for a weather window, but may eventually have to give up for the year.

Andre Borschberg, who piloted the record-breaking Solar Impulse 2 from Nanjing, China to the central Japanese city of Nagoya, said if the plane's round-the-world trip was not finished in the summer, it would have to wait until next year.

NASA said Wednesday an international satellite studying the world's oceans has stopped working after four years.

The space agency said that the Argentine-built satellite ceased operations last week after a hardware failure.

EU lawmakers on Wednesday backed a ban on cloning farm animals and products derived from them, citing deep public unease at the prospect they could make it onto supermarket shelves.

The European Parliament's environment and agriculture committees said proposals submitted by the European Commission had to be stronger to meet concerns over cloning and 'franken-foods' in the 28-nation bloc.

A tiger that escaped from Tbilisi zoo in a freak flood mauled a man to death in the Georgian capital on Wednesday before being gunned down by police, officials said.

The interior ministry had initially said the animal was a lion and deployed special forces to hunt down the beast which had been on the loose since the weekend flooding that killed at least 17 people.