Europe next week will launch a trio of hi-tech satellites to explore something that may seem utterly mundane: Earth's magnetic field.

After all, magnetism has been with us for billions of years.

NASA is preparing to launch its latest orbiter to Mars Monday on the hunt for clues about why the Red Planet lost much of its atmosphere.

The launch of Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN), is could happen as early as 1:28 pm (1828 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, during a two-hour launch window.

What happened to the water on Mars? How did the Red Planet's atmosphere become so thin over time? NASA's MAVEN probe is scheduled to launch Monday on a mission to find out.

The unmanned spacecraft aims to orbit Mars from a high altitude, studying its atmosphere for clues on how the Sun may have influenced gas to escape from the possibly life-bearing planet billions of years ago.

Brazil's environment minister demanded urgent action Thursday to reverse double-digit rises of as much as 52 percent in the rate of deforestation in some Amazon regions over the past year.

Agricultural production has been blamed for the spike but enforcement has also been lax in a giant country encompassing around 8.5 million square kilometers (3.3 million square miles), around three fifths of which is forest.

A scientific study out Thursday identifies 78 sites worldwide in dire need of environmental protection because they harbor species that could go extinct.

Many of the locations are already in protected areas of 34 countries. Together they contain populations of birds, amphibians, and mammals that are globally threatened.

Hundreds of slow lorises have been seized on Indonesia's Java island as animal smugglers were about to send the protected primates to markets to be sold as pets, officials said Friday.

Government officials last week discovered 238 of the nocturnal animals, one of the few mammals that has a toxic bite, packed into small plastic crates at the port of Merak in the north-west of Java.

Japan said Friday it was dramatically scaling back its greenhouse gas emissions target after the Fukushima nuclear accident forced the country to turn to fossil-fuel burning energy sources, a move denounced by climate campaigners.

Tokyo said the new target for 2020 -- 3.8 percent below 2005 levels -- replaces an ambitious goal to slash emissions by one-quarter from 1990 levels, which had been hailed by environmentalists.

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon region rose 28 percent over the past year, Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said Thursday, announcing she was calling an emergency meeting to try to remedy the situation.

"We confirm a 28-percent increase in the rate of deforestation, reaching 5,843 square kilometers (2256 square miles)," Teixeira told a press conference, citing provisional statistics for August 2012 through July this year.

The powers of poison will be on full display in New York's Museum of Natural History starting Saturday, when a new exhibit opens.

The display "reveals the strange and even intriguing things that happen when humans and toxic substances collide," said museum director Ellen Futter.

"Little Red Riding Hood" may have been heading to her grandmother's house -- but anthropologists wanted to know where she came from and just how her story spread.

By applying a mathematical model more commonly used by biologists to study the evolution of species, the researchers were able to create a sort of "evolutionary tree" for the popular folk tale, according to a new study out Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.