Seattle's mayor and environmentalists have vowed to block Royal Dutch Shell PLC from parking two Arctic offshore drilling rigs on Seattle's waterfront, an effort to thwart the new frontier in oil exploration and spark a national debate about fossil fuels and climate change.

WHAT'S AT STAKE?

Large amounts of water may exist on numerous deep space bodies, said a study Thursday that raises the theoretical odds of another planet like Earth sporting the life-giving resource.

The findings, published by the Royal Astronomical Society, are based on the discovery of "a large quantity" of hydrogen and oxygen, the two chemical ingredients of water, in the atmosphere of a white dwarf star. 

Oil-rich United Arab Emirates said Wednesday it was pressing ahead with plans to send the first Arab unmanned probe to Mars by 2021, naming it "Hope".

The probe will leave Earth in 2020 on a mission "designed to complement the science work of other missions and fill important gaps in human knowledge," the Gulf state said in a statement.

Russia said an unmanned supply ship set for the International Space Station will fall back to Earth Friday and burn up in the atmosphere, after the spacecraft suffered a communications failure.

The Progress supply ship is expected to "end its existence on May 8," between 1:23 a.m. and 9.55 p.m, Moscow time (2223 GMT Thursday and 0655 GMT Friday)," the Russian space agency said in a statement released Wednesday.

Residents of the tiny village of Fanalei in the Solomon Islands killed more than 1,600 dolphins in 2013 for their teeth, a local currency and popular adornment, researchers said Wednesday.

The overall recorded tally from 1976-2013 was more than 15,400, according to research published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Pakistan on Tuesday inaugurated a 100 megawatt Chinese-built solar power plant, part of its efforts to battle its ever-increasing energy deficit.

The plant is the first stage of a project that will eventually cover over 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of the central Cholistan desert and add 1,000 megawatts to the nation's electric grid, making it one of the biggest solar parks in the world.

A pilot said Sunday that he is anxious but excited about flying a solar plane solo from China to Hawaii on the longest leg of the first attempt to fly around the world without a drop of fuel.

André Borschberg, 62, is due to fly over the Pacific Ocean for five days and five nights in the plane that has more than 17,000 solar cells on its wings to power its motors and recharge its batteries for nighttime flying.

Surveying her destroyed cornfield in northern Botswana, Minsozie Kasaira wishes for a return to the days of elephant hunting.

Until last year, villagers like Minsozie benefited from local communities being given a quota of elephants that could be shot.

An unmanned NASA spacecraft has crashed on the surface of the planet Mercury, after it ran out of fuel following a successful 11-year mission, the U.S. space agency said Thursday.

The MESSENGER probe -- short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging -- was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, and issued a final farewell on Twitter shortly before its demise at 3:26 pm (1926 GMT).

One out of six species faces extinction as a result of climate change and urgent action must be taken to save large numbers of animals from being wiped out, an analysis said Thursday.

The study, published in the U.S. journal Science, found that a global temperature rise of four degrees Celsius could spell disaster for a huge number of species around the world.