Satellites can help scientists follow parasites and viruses, and in some cases predict months ahead of time an outbreak of dengue fever or malaria, researchers said Sunday.

"Some diseases are highly sensitive to their environment, especially parasitic diseases," said Archie Clements, director of the school of population health at the Australian National University in Canberra.

The master of a Taiwanese ship has been charged with failing to take on a pilot to navigate Australia's Great Barrier Reef, police said Monday.

Environmentalists said the incident  highlights the risks from shipping to the World Heritage site off the northeast coast.

U.S. astrophysicists from the SETI Institute want to send signals to star systems that are relatively close and made up of planets that could potentially be inhabitable

For decades, U.S. astrophysicists seeking to make contact with extraterrestrials have basically just been listening for signals from space.

A U.S. ship was on Saturday towing an Australian fishing trawler to open water after freeing it from Antarctic pack ice, rescue authorities said.

The 63-meter (207-foot) "Antarctic Chieftain" became trapped in ice some 900 nautical miles (1,650 kilometers) northeast of McMurdo Sound on Tuesday, damaging its propeller.

The detente achieved at U.N. talks that concluded Friday with a framework for a world climate pact is only temporary, achieved by kicking the difficult decisions down the road, parties and observers say.

But it also generated a degree of optimism rarely observed in the tense process -- a sense of common purpose which many hope will bolster negotiators in the months to come.

More than 100 pilot whales that stranded on a New Zealand beach have died, conservation officials said Saturday, voicing grave fears for more than 90 others from the pod.

The whales beached themselves on Friday at Farewell Spit at the northern tip of the South Island, with dozens of rescuers racing to re-float the marine mammals on the evening high tide.

Negotiators in Geneva adopted a climate blueprint Friday, a symbolic milestone in the fraught U.N. process that must culminate in a universal pact in Paris in December.

Assembled over the past six days, the 86-page draft plan for limiting man-made global warming was gavelled through at the close of six days of talks, prompting applause from delegates.

Archaeologists in Greece have discovered a rare burial of a prehistoric couple positioned in an embrace, the culture ministry said on Thursday.

The discovery was made in the cave of Diros, a coastal site in the Peloponnese peninsula known to have been inhabited since 6,000 BC, the ministry said in a statement. 

Shoddy waste management and littering across the globe likely added eight million metric tons (17.6 billion pounds) of plastic to the ocean in 2010, posing significant dangers to marine life, scientists said Thursday.

Long-lasting mega-droughts could occur with increasing frequency in the western United States later this century if no action is taken to rein in climate change by curbing fossil fuel use, researchers said Thursday.

Mega-drought is defined as any drought as bad as the worst already seen in the 20th century, but lasting much longer, for 35 years or more.