Bulgaria has imposed a four-year ban on fishing for sturgeon on the River Danube and in its Black Sea waters, the farming ministry said Tuesday.

The restrictions cover four sturgeon species, all threatened with extinction, and was prompted by the need to protect their populations and align Bulgaria's rules with a 10-year ban imposed in 2006 across the Danube in Romania, it said.

Malaysian wildlife authorities said they had rescued a pygmy elephant calf on Borneo island and expressed hope a planned sanctuary would provide protection for the endangered animals.

The male calf, which is less than a month old, was pulled out of a deep moat surrounding a palm oil plantation in remote Sabah state on Friday, said Sen Nathan, a senior official with the Sabah Wildlife Department.

A potent solar flare has unleashed the biggest radiation storm since 2005 and could disrupt some satellite communications in the polar regions, U.S. space weather monitors said Monday.

The event started late Sunday with a moderate-sized solar flare that erupted right near the center of the Sun, said Doug Biesecker, a physicist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Space Weather Prediction Center.

Scientists in Britain and Japan have unveiled a fast-track way towards breeding crops with higher yields or resistance to climate change.

Early beneficiaries should be Japanese farmers who need salt-loving rice plants after their fields were submerged in last year's tsunami.

Tiny footprints and fossil embryos at the oldest dinosaur nesting site ever found have revealed new details about how these ancient creatures reared their young, according to research published on Monday.

The nest belongs to mid-sized dinosaurs from the Early Jurassic Period known as Massospondylus, which grew to four to six meters (13 to 20 feet) long as adults. Their eggs, however, are only six centimeters in diameter.

Japanese researchers have warned of a 70 percent chance that a magnitude-seven earthquake will strike Tokyo within four years, a report said Monday -- much higher than previous estimates.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo's earthquake research institute based the figure on data from the growing number of tremors in the capital since last year's March 11 earthquake off northeast Japan, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

One of the world's most endangered turtles has been released into a Cambodian river with a satellite transmitter attached to its shell to track how it will navigate through commercial fishing grounds and other man-made hazards.

The 75-pound (34-kilogram) southern river terrapin — one of only about 200 adults remaining in the wild — waddled into the Sre Ambel river in southwestern Cambodia this past week to the cheers of local residents and conservationists.

At 10:25 a.m., a dark brown eye was removed from a man whose lids had closed for the last time. Five hours later, the orb was staring up at the ceiling from a stainless steel tray in an operating room with two blind patients — both waiting to give it a second life.

S.P.D. Siriwardana, 63, remained still under a white sheet as the surgeon delicately replaced the cornea that had gone bad in his right eye following a cataract surgery. Across the room, patient A.K. Premathilake, 32, waited for the sclera, the white of the eye, to provide precious stem cells and restore some vision after acid scalded his sight away on the job.

A month ago, a young seal named Marco washed up on a beach on the northern Dutch Frisian island of Ameland, one of a growing number of recently stranded pups that has left his rescuers worried.

Cold, hungry and riddled with parasites, Marco was taken to the Zeehondencreche (seal nursery), the country's oldest and largest seal rehabilitation center on the Dutch north coast.

Scientists have discovered a new flowering plant belonging to the scarce Medinilla group on Fiji's Kadavu island, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said on Friday.

"Although the plant was first found in August of 2010, it has taken this long to go through the process and verify it," IUCN spokeswoman Ewa Ewa Magiera told Agence France Presse.