A U.S.-based Japanese scientist said Wednesday he has succeeded in engineering a version of the so-called swine flu virus that would be able to evade the human immune system.

The research on the 2009 H1N1 virus at a high-security lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has not yet been published, but was first made public July 1 by the Independent newspaper in London.

Oil extended losses in Asia Thursday on prospects that Libya will begin exporting more crude into a global market flush with supplies, while easing concerns about the Iraqi crisis also weighed on prices. 

U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for August delivery eased 47 cents to $104.01 while Brent crude for August was down 33 cents at $110.91 in late-morning trade. 

Two years after making history by unearthing the Higgs boson, the particle that confers mass, physicists are broadening their probe into its identity, hoping this will also solve other great cosmic mysteries.

Sifting through mountains of experimental data, they have now pieced together a partial sketch of the evasive boson's traits and behavior.

A rocket carrying a NASA satellite lit up the pre-dawn skies Wednesday on a mission to track the chief culprit behind global warming.

The Delta 2 rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base along the central California coast and speeded toward low-Earth orbit. It was to separate from the global warming satellite about an hour after liftoff.

Caribbean coral reefs could disappear within 20 years as overfishing has all but wiped out the fish that feast on coral-smothering algae, the U.N. and an international conservation watchdog warned Wednesday.

Just a sixth of the original coral cover exists today in the region, which is home to nine percent of the world's coral reefs, according to study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the U.N.'s environment agency.

Unprecedented measurement of a deep-space comet has found the icy body to be losing about two small glasses of water every second, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Monday.

ESA's probe, Rosetta, made the measurements on June 6, when it aimed a microwave sensor at Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, on which it will land a probe in August after a 10-year space trek.

Plastic junk is floating widely on the world's oceans, but there's less of it than expected, a study says.

Such ocean pollution has drawn attention in recent years because of its potential harm to fish and other wildlife.

A water flow problem on Tuesday forced the US space agency to postpone the launch of a satellite to track atmospheric carbon dioxide, a leading greenhouse gas.

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 was due to take off atop a Delta 2 rocket at 2:56 am Pacific time (0956 GMT) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. But the operation was halted 46 seconds before scheduled liftoff time due to an issue with water flow to the rocket, NASA said.

Satellite images have found that Indonesia's ancient forests, a cradle of biodiversity and a buffer against climate change, have shrunk much faster than thought, scientists said on Sunday.

Between 2000 and 2012, Indonesia lost around 6.02 million hectares (14.4 million acres or 23,250 square miles) of primary forest, an area almost the size of Sri Lanka, they reported.

Global warming will send Antarctica's emperor penguins into decline by 2100, scientists projected Sunday, and called for the emblematic birds to be listed as endangered and their habitat better protected.

The world's largest penguin species came to global fame with a 2005 documentary, "March of the Penguins", portraying their annual trek across the icy wastes, and the 2006 cartoon movie "Happy Feet".