Engineers intrigued by the toughness of mollusc shells, which are composed of brittle minerals, have found inspiration in their structure to make glass 200 times stronger than a standard pane.

Counter-intuitively, the glass is strengthened by introducing a network of microscopic cracks, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.

It turns out there is a Guinness record for the place with the most lightning, and an area of Venezuela with 20,000 flashes of it per hour has won.

The certification was handed over Tuesday by Guinness Book of World Records representative Johanna Hessling.

The jaguar could soon become extinct in Brazil's tropical Atlantic forest, threatening the shrinking primitive forest itself, Brazilian scientists warned Monday.

A study by the Brazilian conservation authority Cenap indicated the adult jaguar population in the region may have fallen to just 250, "an 80 percent slide over the past 15 years."

A court in Kenya on Tuesday slapped a record sentence on a Chinese ivory smuggler, the first person to be convicted under tough new laws designed to stem a surge in poaching.

Tang Yong Jian, 40, was ordered to pay 20 million shillings (170,500 euros, 233,000 dollars) or else go to jail for seven years.

A factory which processes around 600 whale sharks annually has been found in southern China, a conservation group said Monday, calling it the world's biggest slaughterhouse for the endangered species.

Hong Kong-based conservation group WildLifeRisk said it discovered the factory in the town of Pu Qi in Zhejiang province after a four-year investigation.

Philippine authorities said Tuesday they had seized a huge haul of more than a thousand helmet shells from a protected species of sea snail which were being shipped for sale.

Police and fisheries bureau personnel seized 106 boxes, each containing at least 15 of the shells, on the poverty-stricken southern island of Jolo on Saturday following a tip-off, the fisheries bureau said.

Imagine stepping out of your highrise apartment into a sunny, plant-lined corridor, biting into an apple grown in the orchard on the fourth floor as you bid "good morning" to the farmer off to milk his cows on the fifth.

You take the lift to your office, passing the rice paddy and one of the many gardens housed in the glass edifice that not only heats and cools itself, but also captures rainwater and recirculates domestic waste as plant food.

The Grand Canyon as we know it was formed between five and six million years ago, which is youthful in geological terms, but parts of it could be as old as 70 million years, scientists said Sunday.

Experts have debated for nearly 150 years about the age of the canyon, wrangling over how long it took for the grandiose feature to be gouged out by the Colorado River and its tributaries.

The DNA of a hunter-gatherer who lived in Spain some 7,000 years ago suggests that Europeans were dark-skinned until much more recently than previously thought, researchers said Sunday.

Genetic material recovered from a tooth of La Brana 1, an ancient man whose skeleton was dug up in a deep cave system in Spain in 2006, revealed a strange combination of dark skin and blue eyes, according to a study in the journal Nature.

Chinese Internet users flooded the country's social media networks on Monday with condolences for the troubled Jade Rabbit moon rover, which experienced a "mechanical control abnormality" over the weekend.

State-run media reported on Saturday that the country's first moon rover had run into trouble due to "the complicated lunar surface environment". By Monday afternoon, "Jade Rabbit lunar rover" had shot to the top of the most-searched terms list on Sina Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter.