Japan's top research institute on Friday hammered the final nail in the coffin of what was once billed as a ground-breaking stem cell study, dismissing it as flawed and saying the work could have been fabricated.

The revelations come a week after a young researcher at the center of the scandal, which has rocked the country's scientific establishment, said she would resign after failing to reproduce the successful conversion of an adult cell into a stem cell-like state, known as "STAP" cells.

The presents are unwrapped. The children's shrieks of delight are just a memory. Now it's time for another Yuletide tradition: cleaning up the needles that are falling off your Christmas tree.

"I'm not particularly worried about it ... I'll just sweep it up," said Lisa Smith-Hansford of New York, who bought a small tree at a Manhattan sidewalk stand early this week. She likes the smell of a real tree, she said, comparing it to comfort food.

Japan's top research institute on Friday hammered the final nail in the coffin of what was once billed as a ground-breaking stem cell study, dismissing it as flawed and saying the work could have been fabricated.

The revelations come a week after a young researcher at the center of the scandal, which has rocked the country's scientific establishment, said she would resign after failing to reproduce the successful conversion of an adult cell into a stem cell-like state, known as "STAP" cells.

Dutch scientists are recreating the deaths of some of the world's most famous personalities by reconstructing their last moments using scents and sounds.

From the sweet smell of Jacqueline Kennedy's perfume mingled with the scent of John F. Kennedy's blood to Whitney Houston's last drug-fuelled moments in a Beverly Hills bathtub, scientists at Breda university say they offer visitors a unique, if somewhat macabre, historical snapshot.

Mexican authorities are proposing a $37 million plan to ban gillnet fishing in most of the upper Sea of Cortez to save the critically endangered vaquita marina, the world's smallest porpoise.

The plan would compensate fishermen for stopping the use of nets that often sweep up the tiny porpoises along with their catch.

Uruguay, a country of 3.3 million inhabitants and four times as many cows, hopes to feed 50 million people thanks to drones, "smart" combines and other high-tech farming techniques.

At a farm a two-hour drive outside the capital Montevideo, combines on auto pilot meticulously harvest every millimeter of field.

Wildlife authorities in Zimbabwe on Wednesday announced plans to export at least 62 elephants to top up scant state funding and curb a ballooning pachyderm population.

"Zimbabwe got allocations from CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) to export elephants to suitable destinations and one of the destinations is China," Jerry Gotora, chairman of the parks and wildlife authority, told AFP.

Call it a holiday gift from Pele.

Lava from the mountain believed to be home to the Hawaiian volcano goddess has stalled on its slow creep toward a Big Island shopping center.

On land deep in Hong Kong's lush green northern suburbs near the border with mainland China, farmer Koon-wing Chan is working to keep a legendary scent alive in the city known as the Fragrant Harbor.

Chan runs Hong Kong's last commercial plantation of agarwood trees, prized throughout the centuries for aromatic resin used to make incense, perfume and medicine.

A fish eye from a primitive time when Earth was but one single continent, has yielded evidence of color vision dating back at least 300 million years, researchers said Tuesday.

Analyzing the fossilized remains of a fish from the "spiny shark" family that lived long before the dinosaurs, scientists discovered light-sensing "rod" and "cone" eye cells -- the oldest ever found.