Australia insisted it was committed to protecting the Great Barrier Reef on Saturday after the U.N. warned that the natural wonder's world heritage status could be in downgraded in 2014.

UNESCO said little had been done to address concerns about rampant coastal development and water quality raised a year ago with the Australian government in a warning that its heritage status was at risk.

A Chinese fishing vessel that crashed into one of the Philippines' most famous reefs damaged almost 4,000 square meters of centuries-old coral, the marine park said on Saturday.

Some 3,902 square meters (42,000 square feet) of coral was destroyed after the boat became stranded in the Tubbataha marine park -- a UNESCO World Heritage-listed coral reef -- the park management said.

The first-ever manned airplane that can fly by day or night on solar power alone landed in the dark at a major southwestern U.S. airport, a live feed from the organizer's website showed early Saturday.

Solar Impulse, piloted by Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard, touched down at the Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix, Arizona at 0730 GMT after departing from California more than 18 hours earlier on the first leg of a cross-country journey.

The launch Saturday of Europe's lightweight rocket, Vega, from Kourou in French Guiana was put off until an unspecified date because of poor weather conditions at the space base, the European Space Agency said.

The rocket's first mission since its maiden flight in February last year was to have been webcast live.

U.S. scientists have devised tiny winged robots inspired by flies that could one day help pollinate crops or aid the search for survivors at collapse sites -- once they get off the leash, that is.

The prototypes by researchers at Harvard University weigh 80 milligrams and have managed short controlled flights by flapping their mechanical wings while still tethered to a tiny power cable, the journal Science said this week.

Mozambique's rhinoceros population was wiped out more than a century ago by big game hunters. Reconstituted several years ago, the beasts again are on the brink of vanishing from the country by poachers seeking their horns for sale in Asia.

A leading expert told The Associated Press that the last rhino in the southern African nation has been killed. The warden of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park — the only place where the horned behemoths lived in Mozambique — also says poachers have wiped out the rhinos. Mozambique's conservation director believes a few may remain.

A new U.S. report blames a combination of problems for a mysterious and dramatic disappearance of honeybees across the country since 2006.

The multiple causes make it harder to do something about what's called colony collapse disorder, experts say. The disorder has caused as much as one-third of the nation's bees to just disappear each winter since 2006.

An innovative solar-powered aircraft is set to launch Friday from California on a flight across the United States, the first of its kind aiming to showcase what is possible without fossil fuels.

The experimental Solar Impulse plane -- with the wingspan of a Boeing 747 but the weight of a small car -- bears 12,000 solar cells.

Demand for farmland may strip the Greater Mekong region of a third of its remaining forest cover over the next two decades without swift government action, a leading conservation group warned Thursday.

Forests are being cleared for commodities such as rubber and rice while illegal logging is decimating many protected zones, WWF said in a report, adding a contentious dam on Mekong river will deepen already severe ecosystem damage.

Scientists revealed Wednesday that they have found the first solid archaeological evidence that some of the earliest American colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, survived harsh conditions by turning to cannibalism.

For years, there have been tales of people in the first permanent English settlement in America eating dogs, cats, rats, mice, snakes and shoe leather to stave off starvation. There were also written accounts of settlers eating their own dead, but archaeologists had been skeptical of those stories.