After more than 55 days flying over Antarctica, NASA's huge Super-TIGER scientific balloon has broken the record for the longest flight of its kind, bringing back a wealth of data, the U.S. space agency said Monday.

The Super-TIGER balloon spent 55 days, one hour and 34 minutes aloft at an altitude of 127,000 feet (38,710 meters), beating the old record set in 2009 by just over a day.

Furry crabs once thought to be damaging the Great Barrier Reef may in fact be helping save the coral by stopping the spread of disease, a researcher said Tuesday.

Scientists at James Cook University studied the impact of furry coral crabs on fragments suffering from white syndrome, a deadly disease that appears throughout the Indo-Pacific and causes coral tissue to slough off.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Monday he is ready "to be the first man in space" under Iran's ambitious program which aims to send a human being into orbit by 2020.

"Our youth are determined to send a man into space within the next four, five years and I'm sure that will happen," he said during a ceremony in Tehran where two new Iranian-made satellites were unveiled, according to ISNA news agency.

The oil and gas industry is trying to ease environmental concerns by developing nontoxic fluids for the drilling process known as fracking, but it's not clear whether the new product will be widely embraced by drilling companies.

Houston-based energy giant Halliburton Inc. has developed a product called CleanStim, which uses only food-industry ingredients. Other companies have developed nontoxic fluids as well.

Among the more peculiar organisms that inhabit our Earth exists a bacterium that turns water-soluble gold into microscopic nuggets of solid gold, scientists said Sunday.

Chemists have often pondered why the germ Delftia acidovorans is frequently found on the surface of tiny gold nuggets.

The suffocating smog that blanketed swathes of China is now hitting parts of Japan, sparking warnings Monday of health fears for the young and the sick.

The environment ministry's website has been overloaded as worried users log on to try to find out what is coming their way.

Engulfed by a raging torrent of water last week, the town of Chokwe in southern Mozambique was all but destroyed for the second time in 13 years, but it emerged with a hugely lower death toll.

As in 2000 when floods of biblical proportions claimed 800 lives, an underdeveloped network of dams and dykes allowed the swollen Limpopo River to burst its banks, submerging most of the province of Gaza, where Chokwe is located, under meters (feet) of water.

Australia experienced its hottest month on record in January, despite floods and storms that devastated parts of the country's east, officials said.

The Bureau of Meteorology said both the average mean temperature of 29.68 degrees Celsius (85.42 degrees Fahrenheit) and the average mean maximum temperature of 36.92 Celsius surpassed previous records set in January 1932.

U.S. medical specialists from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have figured out how owls can almost fully rotate their heads - by as much as 270 degrees in either direction.

The birds do so while hunting without damaging the delicate blood vessels in their necks and heads, and without cutting off blood supply to their brains.

Australia insisted Friday that protecting the Great Barrier Reef was a top priority, but conservationists WWF said not enough had been done to prevent UNESCO deeming it a world heritage site "in danger".

In June, UNESCO demanded decisive action from Australia to protect the world's largest coral reef from a gas and mining boom and increasing coastal development, or risk the embarrassment of seeing it put on the danger list.