Puerto Ricans are learning to live without water on an island that already was suffering an economic crisis.

A severe drought is forcing businesses to temporarily close, public schools to cancel breakfast service and people to find creative ways to stay clean amid sweltering temperatures.

The world's first ever ant map showing the distribution of the tiny industrious creature around the globe was launched Thursday by the University of Hong Kong in a bid to shed more light on the insect world.

The colourful interactive online map (antmaps.org), which took four years to complete, displays the geographic locations of nearly 15,000 types of ant with the Australian state of Queensland home to the highest number of native species at more than 1,400.

NASA has extended a contract with Russia's space agency for $490 million to carry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station amid a lack of Congressional funding, the U.S. agency said Wednesday. 

The United States will continue to rely exclusively on Russia to take astronauts to the orbiting outpost under the new contract, which runs until 2019, even as relations between the two countries have reached their lowest point since the Cold War.

Barnacles on a wing part that washed up on a remote Indian Ocean island could yield new clues to the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 if it is from the plane, experts said Tuesday

The hunt for the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8 last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, has focused on the southern Indian Ocean off Australia.

A vast bloom of toxic algae off the U.S. West Coast is denser, more widespread and deeper than scientists feared even weeks ago, according to surveyors aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel.

This coastal ribbon of microscopic algae, up to 40 miles wide and 650 feet deep (60 kilometers wide and 200 meters deep) in places, is flourishing amid unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures. It now stretches from at least California to Alaska and has shut down lucrative fisheries. Shellfish managers on Tuesday doubled the area off Washington's coast that is closed to Dungeness crab fishing, after finding elevated levels of marine toxins in tested crab meat.

Somewhere between the rise of single-cell organisms from the primordial soup and the advent of dating apps, reproduction made the leap from cloning to sex.

A ghostly, bottom-dwelling ocean creature that came and went some 565 million years ago just may be the first to cross that threshold, according to a study published this week in Nature.

French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday welcomed a U.S. plan to cut carbon emissions as a "major contribution" to an upcoming global climate conference in Paris.

His U.S. counterpart Barack Obama unveiled plans on Monday to force power plant owners to cut emissions of carbon dioxide -- the most common greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change -- for the first time ever.

Up to 70 rotting crocodile heads have been found in an old freezer dumped at a remote Australian town, police said Tuesday, with the culprits facing large fines and jail time if convicted of the killings.

Several teenagers made the grisly find behind a row of shops at Humpty Doo, 40 kilometers (25 miles) outside Darwin on Sunday and contacted authorities.

Glaciers worldwide have shrunk to levels not seen in 120 years of record-keeping, with melt-off accelerating in the first decade of the 21st century, according to a study released Monday.

On average, glaciers currently lose between 50 to 150 centimetres (20 to 60 inches) of thickness every year, reported the study, published in the Journal of Glaciology.

U.S. President Barack Obama will Monday unveil what he called the "biggest, most important step we've ever taken" to fight climate change, a sensitive issue central to his legacy.

The White House will release the final version of America's Clean Power Plan, a set of environmental rules and regulations that will home in on the pollution from the nation's existing power plants, setting limits on power-plant carbon emissions for the first time.