Last month was so hot it set a new record for the planet, marking the warmest May over land and water since record-keeping began in 1880, US authorities said Monday.

The combined average temperature across the globe was 59.93°F (15.54°C), or 1.33°F (0.74°C) above the 20th century average, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant on Sunday restarted its trouble-plagued water decontamination system for the first time in three months, the utility said.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) has been forced to repeatedly switch off its Advanced Liquid Processing System (ALPS), which purifies radiation-tainted water, due to a series of glitches plaguing the system since trial operations began last year.

Physicists on Sunday said they had learned more about the identity of the Higgs Boson, the elusive particle whose ground-breaking discovery was announced nearly two years ago.

Work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- the particle smasher on the French-Swiss border where the breakthrough was made -- has answered long-standing questions about how the Higgs behaves, they said.

China's river porpoises are rarer than pandas, but fishermen fighting to save them have been snared by a net of blackmail allegations, highlighting uncertainties faced by the country's emerging environmentalists.

Fewer than 1,000 finless porpoises -- grey dolphin-like animals with a hint of a grin on their bulbous faces -- are thought to remain in and around China's vast Yangtze river which carves through the center of the country.

Japan is looking at building a new base on Antarctica so scientists can study air trapped in ice a million years ago, in a bid to better understand climate change, an official said Monday.

Tokyo already has four stations on the frozen continent, two of which are currently in use -- the Syowa Station on the coast and the Dome Fuji Station inland.

A report that scientists are calling one of the most comprehensive studies of great white sharks finds their numbers are surging in the ocean off the Eastern U.S. and Canada after decades of decline.

The study by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, says the population of the notoriously elusive fish has climbed since about 2000 in the western North Atlantic.

American astrophysicists who announced just months ago what they deemed a breakthrough in confirming how the universe was born now admit they may have got it wrong.

The team said it had identified gravitational waves that apparently rippled through space right after the Big Bang.

Construction on the world's largest optical telescope began with a bang Thursday, as workers demolished a hilltop in Chile's Atacama desert.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) telescope, being built by the European Southern Observatory, aims to give astronomers new insight into the origins of the universe and help search for potentially habitable planets elsewhere in the galaxy.

In a skeleton more than 6,200 years old, scientists have found the earliest known evidence of infection with a parasitic worm that now afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide.

Archaeologists discovered a parasite egg near the pelvis of a child skeleton in northern Syria and say it dates back to a time when ancient societies first used irrigation systems to grow crops. Scientists suspect the new farming technique meant people were spending a lot of time wading in warm water — ideal conditions for the parasites to jump into humans. That may have triggered outbreaks of the water-borne flatworm disease known as schistosomiasis.

NASA is zeroing in on the asteroids it wants to capture, haul near the moon and have astronauts visit.

Officials on Thursday described a prime candidate: A tiny asteroid that whizzed about 7,600 miles (12,250 kilometers) above Earth in 2011.