Thousands of small "pyramids" are being planted off the Philippines' famous Boracay resort island in an effort to bring its nearly destroyed coral reefs back to life, an environment group said Thursday.

Over 300 of the structures were planted this week off Boracay's coast and eventually about 5,000 will be placed in the sea, according to Sangkalikasan (Nature) which is behind the effort.

Himalayan glaciers and ice caps that supply water to more than a billion people in Asia are losing mass up to 10 times less quickly than once feared, reports a study published Thursday.

Based on an improved analysis of satellite data from 2003 to 2010, the findings offer a reprieve for a region already feeling the impacts of global warming.

Sheep are among the most genetically diverse domesticated animals, and further breeding could yield more meat and wool, according to a new U.S. study.

The study, published Tuesday in the online journal PLoS Biology, maps out the ancestry of sheep going back 11,000 years, to the origins of animal husbandry, and shows that there may still be room for improvement.

The steady drone of motors along busy commercial shipping lanes not only alters whale behavior but can affect the giant sea mammals physically by causing chronic stress, a study published Wednesday has reported for the first time.

The findings were made possible, researchers said, by an event that at first glance seems far removed from the plight of cetaceans: the attacks on New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

One of the world's smallest primates, the Philippine tarsier, communicates in a range of ultrasound inaudible to predator and prey alike, according to a study published Wednesday.

No bigger than a man's hand, Tarsius syrichta can hear and emit sounds at a frequency that effectively gives it a private channel for issuing warnings or ferreting out crickets for a nighttime snack, the study found.

The call of a Jurassic-era cricket was simple, pure and capable of traveling long distances in the night, said scientists who reconstructed the creature's love song from a 165 million year old fossil.

British scientists based their work out Monday on an extremely well preserved fossil of a katydid, or bush cricket, from China named Archaboilus musicus. The cricket lived in an era when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Experts on Monday raised questions over the scientific benefit and environmental impact of Russia's feat in drilling into a virgin lake under Antarctica's ice sheet.

Kerosene, which the Russians used as antifreeze to prevent the borehole from closing up in the extremely cold depths of the ice sheet, was a potential contamination risk for samples and for the pristine lake itself, they said.

Scientists digging in a Namibian national park have uncovered sponge-like fossils they say are the first animals, a discovery that would push the emergence of animal life back millions of years.

The tiny vase-shaped creatures' fossils were found in Namibia's Etosha National Park and other sites around the country in rocks between 760 and 550 million years old, a 10-member team of international researchers said in a paper published in the South African Journal of Science.

Figuring out how to pack a processor and other electronics into a machine gun bullet has been a challenge for engineers at Sandia National Laboratories, so weapons experts say the miniature guidance system the lab has developed is a breakthrough.

Three years in the making, the bullet prototype represents another step toward a next-generation battlefield that scientists and experts expect to be saturated with technology and information.

NASA says it still has confidence in the quality of Russia's manned rockets, despite an embarrassing series of glitches and failures in the Russian space program.

A leak developed recently during a test of the next Soyuz capsule scheduled to launch astronauts to the International Space Station, so Russian space officials have decided not to use it. That delays upcoming launches.