Cockroaches will eat anything. Except sugar, that is.

Some of the common pests have evolved to learn how to detect and avoid a certain kind of glucose often used in bait traps, according to research published in the U.S. journal Science on Thursday.

Russia has ordered the urgent evacuation of the 16-strong crew of a drifting Arctic research station after the ice floe that hosts the floating laboratory began to disintegrate, officials said Thursday.

Natural Resources and Ecology Minister Sergei Donskoi set a three-day deadline to draft a plan to evacuate the North Pole-40 floating research station.

Neanderthals may have started weaning their young from seven months of age and transferred them to solid food by just over a year, a fossil tooth study said Wednesday.

This is within the range for modern humans and chimpanzees, a research team wrote in the journal Nature, but may have been later compared to Stone Age Homo sapiens.

Swiss researchers said Wednesday that they had taken a step closer to unlocking the mystery of ageing after discovering the impact of a longevity gene in mice and then managing to extend the life-span of worms by 60 percent thanks to a basic antibiotic treatment.

"They were not only living longer, but were also more fit," said Johan Auwerx ion a video released by the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), a cutting-edge Swiss research institute.

The world needs to wake up to the risk of a spike in natural disasters linked to climate change and strive to find ways to cut the human and economic cost, the United Nations warned on Tuesday.

"We live in a time of huge natural disasters which are made worse by climate change," the U.N.'s deputy secretary-general, Jan Eliasson, told reporters at the start of a three-day conference on risk reduction in Geneva.

Early humans living in South Africa made cultural and industrial leaps in periods of wetter weather, said a study Tuesday that compared the archaeological record of Man's evolution with that of climate change.

Anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, first made their appearance in Africa during the Middle Stone Age which lasted from about 280,000 to 30,000 years ago.

The first-ever manned airplane that can fly by day or night on solar power alone was set to soar early Wednesday on the second leg of its journey across the United States.

The fuel-free plane was due to leave Phoenix, Arizona for Dallas, Texas, organizers said. The U.S. crossing is being billed as the plane's first cross-continent flight.

A shipment of 259 elephant tusks smuggled out of Africa has been seized in the United Arab Emirates, the International Wildlife Fund for Animal Welfare said Tuesday.

The tusks were discovered at a Dubai port in a container shipped from Mombasa, Kenya labelled as wooden furniture.

Tornados, among the most violent of atmospheric storms, rarely reach the size and brutality of the twister that swept through an Oklahoma City suburb on Monday, experts say.

And seldom do they hit built-up areas.

An Australian zoo said Tuesday the birth of a southern white rhinoceros was a "sign of hope" for the species given the escalation of poaching in Africa.

Taronga Western Plains Zoo said the yet-to-be-named male calf was born to first-time mother Mopani in the safari-style animal park in Dubbo, 400 kilometres (250 miles) west of Sydney, on May 14.