Wildlife numbers have plunged by more than half in just 40 years as Earth's human population has nearly doubled, a survey of over 3,000 vertebrate species revealed on Tuesday.

From 1970 to 2010, there was a 39-percent drop in numbers across a representative sample of land- and sea-dwelling species, while freshwater populations declined 76 percent, the green group WWF said in its 2014 Living Planet Report.

Russia on Sunday successfully launched a Proton-M rocket carrying a satellite into orbit in the first such launch since one of the rockets fell back to Earth soon after liftoff in May.

The Proton-M rocket lifted off on schedule from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:23 am Moscow time (2023 GMT Saturday), carrying a Russian communications satellite, Russia's space agency said in a statement.

The suddenness of the eruption of Japan's Mount Ontake volcano is an extremely rare phenomenon which makes it impossible to take precautionary measures, French volcanologist Jacques-Marie Bardintzeff told Agence France Presse Sunday.

After 35 years without a major eruption, the 3,067-metre (10,121-foot) volcano in central Japan reawakened on Saturday, spewing a deadly blanket of ash, rocks and steam down slopes popular with hikers.

Unregulated genetically modified wheat has popped up in a second location in the United States, this time in state of Montana, the Agriculture Department said Friday.

No genetically engineered wheat has been approved for U.S. farming, and the discovery of unapproved varieties can pose a potential threat to U.S. trade with countries that have concerns about genetically modified foods.

Europe's Rosetta spacecraft will attempt on November 12 to land a robot lab on a comet hurtling through deep space in a first for humankind, a statement said Friday.

Ten days after unveiling the preferred landing spot on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency (ESA) has now set a firm date for the high-stakes operation more than 450 million kilometers (280 miles) from Earth.

Philippine officials said Saturday they had set a new world record for the most trees planted in an hour, with 3.2 million seedlings sown as part of a national forestation program.

Official certification from Guinness World Records will still take weeks but government officers expressed confidence they had broken the old record of 1.9 million trees planted in India on August 15, 2011.

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying an American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts, including the first woman cosmonaut in 17 years, blasted off on schedule Friday, Russian mission control said.

The Soyuz-TMA14M spacecraft took off at 12:25 am Moscow time (2025 GMT Thursday) from Russia's Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to start the journey to the International Space Station (ISS).

Innovative Stone Age tools may have been developed by people in Eurasia and -- contrary to widely held views -- not just invented in Africa, a study published Thursday found.

Research published in the journal Science shows evidence that refined stone weapons were developed in Armenia about 325,000 years ago, challenging the theory held by many archaeologists that such technology came from Africa then spread to Eurasia as the human population expanded.

Once upon a time, farming was a blissfully low-tech business on Colombia's northern plains.

The lush tropical climate allowed rice farmers to harvest two or three times a year and protect their crops using little more than scarecrows and slingshots to fend off hungry birds.

Having renewed their commitment to saving Earth's climate, governments face daunting challenges in the coming months to draft a global pact and set targets for slashing carbon emissions, analysts said Wednesday.

Important signals went out Tuesday from a special summit of political leaders and corporate bosses hosted by U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon in New York.