Global warming will reduce the world's crop production by up to two percent every decade and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of this century, according to a draft U.N. report, Japanese media said Friday.

The document is the second volume in a long-awaited trilogy by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel-winning group of scientists, which is set to be issued next month after a five-day meeting in Japan, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

NASA on Wednesday announced a torrent of new planet discoveries, hailing a "bonanza" of 715 worlds now known outside the solar system thanks to the Kepler space telescope's planet-hunting mission.

A new method for verifying potential planets led to the volume of new discoveries from Kepler, which aims to help humans search for other worlds that may be like Earth.

U.S. and British scientific academies said Wednesday there was a clear consensus that climate change is real and will have serious disruptive effects on the planet.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society said they were making the joint declaration in hopes of moving the public debate forward -- to the question of how the world responds, instead of whether climate change is happening.

Japan will launch its latest rocket early Friday morning, carrying a hi-tech satellite to monitor global rainfall and help meteorologists forecast big storms.

The H-IIA rocket will blast off from a southern Japanese island at 3:37 am on Friday, (1837 GMT Thursday) with the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core observatory aboard, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

Scientists investigating a graveyard of marine mammal fossils near Chile's northern coast say toxins generated by algae blooms most likely poisoned the animals millions of years ago.

The study by a team of Chilean and Smithsonian Institution scientists was published Wednesday in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Militant environmental group Sea Shepherd on Wednesday said it is seeking a Supreme Court injunction to halt a controversial shark culling policy in Western Australia.

The group, best known for battling Japanese whalers in the Antarctic, has teamed up with Sharon Burden, the mother of a shark attack victim, to apply for a judicial review of the decision, claiming it involves the unlawful killing of a protected species.

China's biggest online face-mask sellers were running out of stock Wednesday as consumers rushed to protect themselves from smog that has shrouded large swathes of northern China for an entire week.

Beijing's official reading for PM 2.5 -- small airborne particles which easily penetrate the lungs and have been linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths -- stood at 501 micro grams per cubic metre on Wednesday afternoon. The World Health Organisation's recommended safe limit is 25.

Chateau Paradise or Chateau Rotgut?

Why is it that one wine can be exquisitely smooth, and another stomach-turningly tart?

Environmental group Greenpeace on Wednesday accused U.S. consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble of responsibility for the destruction of Indonesian rain-forests and the habitat of endangered orangutans and tigers.

In an extensive new report, Greenpeace said the company was using Indonesian palm oil from suppliers with links to the destruction of ancient rain-forest, haze-inducing forest fires and an orangutan "graveyard".

A Burgundy winemaker who has defied a government order to use pesticides in his organic vineyard said Monday he was being treated like a healthy person forced to undergo chemotherapy.

Emmanuel Giboulot, whose case has become a cause celebre among environmentalists, theoretically risked a six-month prison term and a fine of up to 30,000 euros ($41,000) as he appeared in court on Monday.