Panama Canal expansion work has uncovered an unexpected trove of archeological and paleontological treasures, scientists said, as the massive construction project winds down.

Workers who have blasted through mountains and dug up thick vegetation, have also uncovered the fossils of some 3,000 invertebrates and 500 vertebrates, as well as of more than 250 plants -- including the remains of a forest consumed by fire after a volcanic eruption.

Lava from one of the world's most active volcanos is creeping slowly but steadily through cracks in the earth toward a rural subdivision on Hawaii's Big Island. Scientists warn that if the lava flow from Kilauea continues on its path, it could reach a small patch of homes in about a week.

Here's a look at Kilauea, which has been continuously erupting since 1983:

A German museum said Thursday it will look into the origins of a scalp claimed by a Native American tribe as an ancestral artefact.

Scientists from the Karl May Museum in the eastern town of Radebeul near Dresden will begin an investigation to shed light on the provenance of one of 17 scalps in its collections, a museum spokeswoman said.

Greenland began heating up around 19,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, just like the rest of the northern hemisphere, researchers said Thursday in a report that resolves a paradox over when that warming happened.

Previous studies had suggested this warming went back only 12,000 years, according to the study published in the U.S. journal Science.

Creating a sanctuary to protect international waters surrounding the North Pole would be supported by a huge majority of people across 30 countries, a Greenpeace poll said.

A total of 74 percent of respondents reported they were in favor of a formally protected area, while only 17 percent said they were against the idea.

The European Space Agency (ESA) will on September 15 unveil which of five possible sites it has chosen for the first-ever landing of a probe from Earth on a comet, it said Thursday.

"At present, the landing is scheduled for November 11," added an ESA statement.

Astronomers said Wednesday they have mapped the galaxy supercluster of which our Solar System forms a tiny part, and named the mighty mass Laniakea, or "immense heaven" in the language of Hawaii.

Laniakea comprises some 100,000 galaxies with about a hundred million billion suns, they reported in the journal Nature.

Japan is seeking international support for its plans to hunt minke whales in the Antarctic Ocean next year by scaling down the whaling research program the U.N. top court rejected earlier this year, fisheries officials said Wednesday.

Whaling for research purposes is exempt from the 1986 international ban on commercial whaling, and Japan has conducted hunts in the Antarctic and Pacific on that basis. But in March, the International Court of Justice ruled the Antarctic program wasn't scientific as Japan had claimed and must stop.

A French court Thursday slapped two-month suspended prison sentences on 55 Greenpeace activists who launched an audacious break-in at France's oldest nuclear power plant to highlight weaknesses at atomic installations. 

Only three of the 55 defendants turned up in court in the eastern French city of Colmar to face trial over the March 18 protest at the Fessenheim power plant near the border with Germany and Switzerland.

The outgoing head of the fisheries management body for the western and central Pacific has warned that some tuna stocks were now so low they should not be fished.

Glenn Hurry, executive director of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC), said the situation was not yet unrecoverable, but it was at a dangerous level and worsening.