File photo of Tibetans passing the Potala Palace in the capital Lhasa, where pollution levels have reached new heights, shrouding the city in dust and halting flights

China's pollution reached new heights on Friday, as the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was shrouded in a cloud of dust that halted flights and rendered one of its most-recognizable landmarks nearly invisible.

Two Australian explorers have battled dangerous sea ice to reach the historic Mawson's Huts in Antarctica which have been isolated for years by a giant iceberg blocking the route in, officials said Friday.

The huts, in the eastern sector of the Australian Antarctic Territory, some 3,000 kilometers south of Hobart, were erected and occupied by the Australian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1914 led by explorer Sir Douglas Mawson.

The European Space Agency has launched a satellite that it hopes will produce the most accurate three-dimensional map of our part of the Milky Way galaxy.

The agency says its Gaia satellite was lifted into space aboard a Russian-made Soyuz carrier system from French Guiana at 6:12 a.m. (0912 GMT; 4:12 a.m. EST) Thursday.

Dolphins living in one of the areas worst hit by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill were in bad shape a year later, with lung problems consistent with exposure to oil, according to a study assessing damage from the spill.

Government, academic and other researchers made comprehensive check-ups on 29 dolphins in Barataria Bay in August 2011 as part of the Natural Resource Damage Assessment — a federal process to determine both the extent of damage and how to repair it. Barataria Bay was one of the areas where pelicans struggled in heavy slicks and thick globs of oil washed onto marshy islands between April and July 2010.

Chinese workers are on their way to build the country's fourth Antarctic research base and a fifth is being planned, state-run media said Thursday as the country expands its imprint on the icy continent.

Construction on the main building of the fourth camp, named Taishan, will be completed next year, the state-run China Daily reported.

Australian geologists on Tuesday opened up the tantalizing but controversial prospect that Antarctica could be rich in diamonds.

In a scientific paper published in the journal Nature Communications, a team said they had found a telltale rock called kimberlite in the Prince Charles Mountains in East Antarctica.

November was a hot month for planet Earth.

Government scientists reported Tuesday that last month set a heat record. They say it was the warmest November on record, across Earth, since record-keeping began in 1880.

A rare full skeleton of a huge diplodocus dinosaur sold in Britain last month was bought by the Natural History Museum of Denmark, the institution said on Tuesday.

"I'm very, very happy -- and I know the former owner is too -- that it's coming to a museum," said exhibition manager Hanne Strager.

In a darkened auditorium some 250 young Chinese sat spellbound in a projector's otherworldly blue glow, listening to the father of China's lunar program chart their country's once and future voyages in the final frontier.

While the U.S. and others retreat from space China is seeking to establish itself as an ascending superpower, in the same way that the U.S. and Soviet Union did when they alone dominated global politics.

In a finding likely to be a bitter blow for many New Zealanders, researchers have found the country's iconic kiwi bird probably descended from an ancestor that flew in from Australia.

Palaeontologist Trevor Worthy of Adelaide's Flinders University said fossilized remains suggested the flightless bird did not evolve from the extinct giant moa, as has long been assumed.