Three tortoises wearing iPads for a controversial art exhibit have been removed at a veterinarian's request because of wet and cool weather in Aspen, Colorado.

The tortoises at the Aspen Art Museum were taken to an undisclosed conservation site on Monday, less than three weeks after the exhibit opened. The Aspen Art Museum says the conservation site will be the permanent home for the African sulcata tortoises.

It's a dry winter day in southeast Brazil, but a steamy tropical summer reigns inside the labs at Oxitec, where workers are making an unusual product: genetically modified mosquitoes to fight dengue fever.

The British biotech firm has altered the DNA of the Aedes aegypti mosquito to prevent it from spreading the potentially deadly virus, which has hit Brazil harder than any other country this year.

Scientists are monitoring lava flowing from a Hawaii volcano eruption that could threaten homes.

The June 27 lava flow, named for the date it began erupting from a new vent, isn't an immediate threat to homes or structures downhill of the flow, but could become one in weeks or months if it continues to advance, the U.S. Geological Survey's Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said. The Kilauea volcano has been continuously erupting since 1983, but new vents — or points where lava reaches the surface — have opened up periodically.

Factfile on the European global navigation system GalileoView Photo

Factfile on the European global navigation system Galileo

A three-million-year-old child's skull uncovered in South Africa has no signs of the kind of soft spot that would be seen in human children with larger brains, a study said Monday.

The findings are the latest contribution to long-running debate over whether the Taung Child fossil may have represented the earliest signs of a fusing skull.

Citrus has always been synonymous with Florida.

The orange adorns the state license plate. The University of Florida's famed football stadium was named after an orange magnate. There is even a county called Citrus.

Honeybees probably originated in Asia, not Africa, said scientists Sunday who had teased interesting tidbits from the busy little pollinators' genome that they hope can be used to protect it.

They sequenced the genomes of 140 honeybees from 14 populations from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, United States and Brazil, looking for DNA clues as to how the insects responded to survival threats throughout their 300,000-year history.

Poachers slaughtering Africa's elephants and rhinos with impunity are often shielded from police by powerful connections, but a group of conservationists has turned to the anonymity of tip-offs to try to stem the killing.

The founders of WildLeaks -- a sort of WikiLeaks for the environment -- say it is the first secure, online whistle-blowing platform dedicated to wildlife and forest crime.

Two satellites for Europe's rival to GPS were lifted into space on Friday to boost the Galileo constellation to six orbiters of a final 30, the European Space Agency (ESA) said.

The launch of satellites Doresa and Milena, the first with full operational capability, brought the system a step closer to becoming fully functional.

"Pepe the Missionary," a giant tortoise who rose to fame as one of the most photographed animals on Ecuador's Galapagos Islands, has died at age 60, officials said Friday.

Pepe, who lived in a corral at the Galapagos National Park's Interpretation Center, died of natural causes, said the park's ecosystems director, Victor Carrion.