An intrepid Australian bird-spotter has captured the best evidence in a century of a live "night parrot", a rare creature that ranks among the world's most enigmatic avian species, scientists said Thursday.

John Young, a naturalist photographer, presented photos and video of the small, yellowish-green parrot to experts at the Queensland Museum this week which government scientist Leo Joseph said "make it seem very clear that he's found the bird".

Chinese beachgoers walk by an algae covered public beach in Qingdao, northeast Shandong province, on July 4, 2013. The seas off China have been hit by their largest ever growth of algae, ocean officials …more

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European astronomers said on Friday they had devised a technique to detect water in the atmosphere of planets orbiting other stars.

Using a telescope in Chile, they teased out a tell-tale infra-red signature from water in the atmosphere of a gassy planet called HD 189733b, which orbits its star every two days and is hot enough to melt steel.

Global warming accelerated since the 1970s and broke more countries' temperature records than ever before in the first decade of the new millennium, U.N. climate experts said Wednesday.

A new analysis from the World Meteorological Organization says average land and ocean surface temperatures from 2001 to 2010 rose above the previous decade, and were almost a half-degree Celsius above the 1961-1990 global average.

Jason-1, a satellite that for more than a decade precisely tracked rising sea levels across a vast sweep of ocean and helped forecasters make better weather and climate predictions, has ended its useful life after circling the globe more than 53,500 times, NASA announced Wednesday.

The joint U.S. and French satellite was decommissioned this week after its last remaining transmitter failed, according to a NASA statement.

A revolutionary solar-powered plane is about to end a slow, symbolic journey across America by quietly buzzing the Statue of Liberty and landing in a city whose buildings often obscure the sun.

The Solar Impulse leaves from Washington on a journey planned for Saturday, depending on the weather. It will take hours for the journey — top speed is 45 mph (73 kph) — and there are none of the most basic comforts of flying.

President Barack Obama's push to fight global warming has triggered condemnation from the U.S. coal industry across the industrial Midwest, where state and local economies depend on the health of an energy sector facing strict new pollution limits.

But such concerns stretch even to New England, an environmentally focused region that long has felt the effects of drifting emissions from Rust Belt states.

Australia's noxious cane toad is wiping out populations of a unique miniature crocodile, researchers warned Wednesday, with fears the warty, toxic creature could extinguish the rare reptile.

A team from Charles Darwin University studying the impacts of the foul toad in upstream escarpments found "significant declines" in numbers of dwarf freshwater crocodiles after the amphibians' arrival.

The Red Cross has launched a light-hearted education campaign aimed at those it describes as most vulnerable to climate change: Pacific islanders living on low-lying atolls threatened by rising seas.

Red Cross disaster management specialist Tom Bamforth said the Pacific's complex weather patterns were well understood by scientists, but the knowledge was not filtering down to local decision-makers.

A new method could double the lead time for forecasting the ocean warming trend known as El Nino and help communities better prepare for crops losses, floods and drought, German researchers said Monday.

The forecasting algorithm is based on the interactions between sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific and the rest of the ocean, and appears to warn of an El Nino event one year in advance instead of the current six months.