Scientists have discovered a new species of deep-sea coral in underwater canyons off the Northern California coast, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Wednesday.

A NOAA research team using small submersibles found the coral in September near national marine sanctuaries off the coast of Sonoma County, the agency said.

Chinese diplomatic and military staff went on buying sprees for illegal ivory while on official visits to East Africa, sending prices soaring, an environmental activist group said Thursday.

Tens of thousands of elephants are estimated to be slaughtered in Africa each year to feed rising Asian demand for ivory products, mostly from China, the continent's biggest trading partner.

Until a few decades ago, there were no beavers in Patagonia. That changed when 20 pairs of the tree-chewing creature were introduced with the hopes of creating a fur industry.

Today, their numbers have exploded and they pose a serious threat to the South American area's biodiversity.

As slow-moving lava approached a cemetery in a rural Hawaii town, Aiko Sato placed flowers at the headstone of the family plot she's tended to over the years, thinking it would be the last time she would see it.

"I made peace with myself," Sato said Monday of visiting the Pahoa Japanese Cemetery on Oct. 23. A few days later, lava smothered part of the cemetery and the family believed the headstone had been buried.

Small islands, long thought to be natural tsunami barriers for coast-dwellers, may in fact amplify the waves they are supposed to break, researchers warned Wednesday.

The findings are of concern, for many coastal communities have settled in areas traditionally believed to be shielded from waves by offshore islands.

Will space historians one day say "Agilkia" with the same awe as they utter "Tranquility Base," where in 1969 Man first walked on the Moon?

Agilkia -- called after an island on the Nile -- has been selected as the name of the site for the first landing on a comet, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Tuesday.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Tuesday defended using coal to generate energy as "the foundation of our prosperity", after the United Nations warned that carbon emissions were leading to disaster.

U.N. climate experts said on Sunday that emissions of three key greenhouse gases were at their highest levels in more than 800,000 years and Earth was on track for temperatures to rise by at least four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 over pre-industrial times.

Richard Branson, the British billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, on Monday hit out against "self-proclaimed experts" asserting an explosion was behind the crash of the company's spacecraft in the U.S. last week.

Evidence showed there was "no explosion" behind the deadly crash last Friday of SpaceShipTwo, he told Sky News television.

Local legend has it that Pakistan's Indus River dolphin was once a woman, transformed by a curse from a holy man angry that she forgot to feed him one day.

After thousands of years swimming the mighty river the gentle, blind mammal is under threat from a combination of uncontrolled fishing and damage to its habitat caused by man-made dams.

Climate change is happening, it's almost entirely man's fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday.

The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's giant climate assessment offered no surprises, nor was it expected to since it combined the findings of three reports released in the past 13 months.