In a world first, a woman has given birth after surgeons implanted ovarian tissue that had been removed when she was a child, doctors reported Wednesday.

The girl was coming up for her fourteenth birthday when she was diagnosed with acute anaemia, needing powerful, ovary-damaging treatment.

A radical environmental group has agreed to pay $2.55 million to Japanese whalers for breaching a U.S. court injunction to stay clear of their vessels in the Antarctic Ocean.

The United States-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and former senior officials of the group last week agreed to pay the sum to resolve civil contempt charges against them in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, court documents showed.

NASA launched a giant balloon Monday carrying a kind of "flying saucer" that will test technologies for landing on Mars, but its outsized parachute only partly deployed.

The aircraft fitted with the largest parachute ever constructed -- after several days of weather-related delays -- was launched from a military base in Hawaii. 

A bird that was once one of the most abundant in Europe and Asia is being hunted to near extinction because of Chinese eating habits, according to a study published Tuesday.

The population of the yellow-breasted bunting has plunged by 90 percent since 1980, all but disappearing from eastern Europe, Japan and large parts of Russia, said the study, published in the Conservation Biology journal.

Only little fish are pulled from the coastal waters off Haiti.

In this overfished area of northern Haiti, fishermen who want a catch big enough for a meal say they must travel three hours in a boat to the Dominican Republic, where they scour the reefs of a national park and risk arrest, beatings or even death.

The widest global effort yet to gauge citizens' views on climate change showed 79 percent to be "very concerned" about its effects, but less than half support a carbon tax to curb emissions, organizers said Sunday.

Results of the day-long consultation held in 75 countries on Saturday were posted on the website of the initiative dubbed World Wide Views on Climate and Energy.

In a boost for hopes to curb climate change, China's greenhouse gas emissions will probably peak in 2025, five years earlier than its stated target, a study said Monday.

On current trends, the world's biggest carbon emitter will discharge 12.5-14 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) in 2025, after which emissions will decline, it said.

Russia successfully launched a military satellite on Friday, following a recent string of failures for the country's space program.

The military satellite sent into space from the Plesetsk cosmodrome in northern Russia at 1524 GMT was put into orbit as planned, state news agency TASS reported, quoting a defense ministry spokesman.

Japan may find itself the odd man out when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe presents his government's blueprint for combating climate change at this weekend's summit of the world's leading industrialized democracies.

The Group of Seven host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, has indicated she supports a pledge of eventual zero carbon emissions. Japan favors coal, gas and nuclear power over green energy despite rapid growth of investment in renewables since all its nuclear reactors were taken offline following the 2011 disaster in Fukushima.

From the typhoon-ravaged Philippines to the Arizona desert, thousands of people began gathering Saturday in small groups in 79 countries for what was touted as the biggest public debate on climate change

Results of the day-long consultations will be submitted to climate change negotiators ahead of a year-end United Nations summit in Paris, where world leaders will gather to forge a new treaty aimed at curbing global warming.