Analysis of a meteorite that fell in the Moroccan desert three years ago revives theories about life on Mars, scientists said on Tuesday.

Scrutiny of cracks in the rock revealed "unique" carbon traces, according to a team led by the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.

Environmental activist group Sea Shepherd on Wednesday left Australia on a campaign targeting illegal fishing in the wild Southern Ocean, having successfully seen off Japanese whalers after a decade of harassment.

The conservationists said with Japan's annual hunt on hold after an International Court of Justice ruling, it would focus its summer campaign on halting the fishing of rare Antarctic and Patagonian toothfish, vowing to "track down the criminal profiteers".

Like ailing giants, the tropical glaciers of the Andes Mountains are melting at worrying speed, raising scientists' fears that many will disappear before anything can be done to save them.

These icy castles, scattered across Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, are under a microscope at the United Nations climate talks this month in the Peruvian capital Lima, where 195 countries are trying to hammer out the framework of a global deal to cut the carbon emissions warming the planet.

Japan on Wednesday successfully launched a probe destined for a distant asteroid on a six-year mission, just weeks after a European spacecraft's historic landing on a comet.

Mastodons, the giant lumbering cousins of mammoths and elephants, likely disappeared from Alaska and the Yukon long before humans arrived across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia, researchers said Monday.

Mastodons were once believed to have roamed the snowy Arctic region alongside the first human colonists some 13,000 to 14,000 years ago, but new evidence suggests they disappeared tens of thousands of years earlier and were not hunted to extinction.

In the more than two decades since world leaders first got together to try to solve global warming, life on Earth has changed, not just the climate. It's gotten hotter, more polluted with heat-trapping gases, more crowded and just downright wilder.

The numbers are stark. Carbon dioxide emissions: up 60 percent. Global temperature: up six-tenths of a degree. Population: up 1.7 billion people. Sea level: up 3 inches. U.S. extreme weather: up 30 percent. Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica: down 4.9 trillion tons of ice.

Oil company TransCanada suspended construction of a terminal on a major pipeline along the St. Lawrence River Monday after Canadian authorities classified a nearby population of beluga whales as "endangered."

The arctic white whale, with its distinctive spherical forehead and smiling mouth, is present in and around Cacouna, Quebec where the terminal is planned.

NASA's multi-billion dollar Orion capsule is poised for its first test launch Thursday, in a demonstration flight that aims to propel it higher than any spacecraft meant to carry humans in 40 years.

After launching from Cape Canaveral, Florida atop a powerful Delta IV rocket at 7:05 am (1205 GMT), the unmanned spacecraft should circle the Earth twice and reach a height of 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers), more than 15 times the altitude of the orbiting International Space Station.

The sprawling power station that hums and coughs along this coast in Indonesia is labeled as a Japanese contribution to the global fight against climate change.

But the Cirebon plant, built with Japanese financing two years ago, is not powered by the sun, the wind or any kind of renewable energy. It's fueled by the biggest source of carbon pollution in the energy system: Coal.

His corn and bean fields ravaged by drought, Nicaraguan farmer Leonel Sanchez Hernandez grudgingly found a new harvest: tarantulas.

He gets a little over a dollar for each of the hairy critters, which breeders sell overseas as pets.