China denied Friday that a dam it was building on a major river in Tibet was impacting the lower reaches of the waterway in India, despite complaints that water-levels there were plunging.

The Brahmaputra has its source in China's southwestern Tibet region where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo, and it enters India in the mountainous, remote northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, where it is called the Siang.

A man was mauled by a lioness at a wildlife park in Darwin on Friday and rushed to hospital with arm injuries, officials at the facility said.

Peter Davidson had muscle torn from the bone of his arm after apparently putting it through the cage bars.

Australian scientists mapping the Great Barrier Reef will broadcast their findings in partnership with Google, modeled on its "Street View" to spotlight the impact of climate change.

The University of Queensland's Seaview Survey, funded by global insurance giant Catlin, will use custom-designed cameras and diving robots to plumb never-before-seen depths of the reef off Australia's northeast coast.

Two-thirds of China's cities currently fail to meet stricter air quality standards that the government wants to phase in over four years to combat notoriously smoggy skies, a senior Chinese environmental official said Friday.

The State Council, China's Cabinet, on Wednesday issued new limits on pollutants to go into effect nationwide by 2016. It also said major cities must launch programs this year to regularly monitor additional kinds of pollutants for the first time, including fine particles associated with health problems.

Engineering professor Donald Sadoway on Thursday used an old-school chalk board at the prestigious TED gathering to write the formula for a liquid battery that could one day cut the need for new power plants.

"The way things stand, electricity demand must be in constant balance with supply," Sadoway told the tech-savvy audience in southern California.

Oetzi the iceman, whose 5,000-year-old remains were found in the Alps 21 years ago, might have died of a heart attack had he lived longer and was allergic to milk products, new research suggests.

After analyzing raw data gained from a sequencing of Oetzi's DNA, researchers have discovered he was genetically predisposed to cardiovascular disease, and that he already had a hardening of the arteries when he was killed.

The giant dinosaurs that roamed the world some 150 million years ago shared the planet with equally daunting parasites: blood-gobbling fleas that were up two centimeters long.

So say Chinese and French paleontologists, who have pored over nine extraordinary fossils unearthed from Inner Mongolia and Liaoning province.

Contrary to its alluring name, Venus is the planet from hell, with an atmosphere so hot, toxic and heavy that any visitor would risk being simultaneously melted, suffocated and crushed.

But not just that: the second planet from the Sun turns on its axis so slowly that, for any survivor, a Venusian day would seem interminable, for it is the equivalent of 243 days on Earth.

A major river in India's northeast that originates in Tibet has suddenly dried up, triggering speculation that China might be responsible, a local official told Agence France Presse on Thursday.

The Brahmaputra has its source in China's southwestern Tibet region where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo, and it enters India in the mountainous, remote northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, where it is called the Siang.

To save the imperiled spotted owl, the Obama administration is moving forward with a controversial plan to shoot barred owls, a rival bird that has shoved its smaller cousin aside.

The plan is the latest federal attempt to protect the northern spotted owl, the passive, one-pound bird that sparked an epic battle over logging in the Pacific Northwest two decades ago.