China's first lunar rover entered the moon's orbit on Friday, state media reported, a key step towards the vessel's planned landing later this month.

The rover -- known as Yutu, or Jade Rabbit -- reached lunar orbit late Friday, the official Xinhua news agency said, about 112 hours after it was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China.

Two Japanese whaling ships and a surveillance vessel left Saturday for the annual hunt in the Antarctic Sea, Kyodo News said.

The three ships departed from the western port of Shimonoseki to join other ships to hunt up to 935 Antarctic minke whales and up to 50 fin whales through March, the news agency said.

One of this year's Nobel Prize laureates says learning how to handle failure is key to becoming a successful scientist.

American James Rothman, who shared the medicine prize with countryman Randy Schekman and German-American Thomas Sudhof, said Friday that doing scientific research almost always means not getting the desired result.

China's commercial hub Shanghai was blanketed by dense smog Friday, delaying flights and spurring sales of face masks.

Levels of PM 2.5 -- tiny particles in the air considered particularly hazardous to health -- rose to more than 600 micrograms per cubic meter in the afternoon, Shanghai's government said on its microblog.

President Francois Hollande said Thursday France would increase fines for illegal trading in ivory and endangered animal species.

Speaking at a round table on poaching that gathered French and African leaders, Hollande said he had asked Justice Minister Christiane Taubira to ramp up action against trafficking in imperiled species and animal parts.

Thirty-five pilot whales stranded in a remote part of Florida's Everglades National Park headed toward deeper waters, raising hopes that they could be saved.

Eleven whales have died since the mass stranding was first reported Tuesday after an additional carcass was found. Four of them had to be euthanized.

A thin layer of very fine clay with a consistency similar to some cosmetics made Japan's tsunami-causing earthquake of 2011 much more dramatic because it acted as a lubricant, scientists say.

The narrow strip of slippery, wet clay that sits between two tectonic plates off the country's northeast coast allowed them to shift past each other at tremendous speed and to travel much further than in most regular quakes, researchers said.

Anthropologists said Wednesday they had decoded the oldest DNA ever found in the human family, extracted from a 400,000-year-old thigh bone found in a pit in Spain.

The feat expands knowledge of human genetics by some 300,000 years, they said, but also suggests the odyssey of Man's evolution may have been more convoluted than thought.

Australian researchers said Thursday they had established the existence of vast freshwater reserves trapped beneath the ocean floor which could sustain future generations as current sources dwindle.

Lead author Vincent Post, from Australia's Flinders University, said that an estimated 500,000 cubic kilometers (120,000 cubic miles) of low-salinity water had been found buried beneath the seabed on continental shelves off Australia, China, North America and South Africa.

Oil exploration and increased sea traffic in the Arctic are encroaching on polar bear habitat, adding to the existing climate change risk, representatives of Arctic nations said at a Moscow conference Wednesday.

"Today we face new challenges with the ship traffic increase and the oil and gas development," Canada's Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq said at the international forum on polar bear conservation organised by the World Wildlife Fund.