Several dozen Humboldt penguins sun themselves along the coast of an islet in central Chile where the majestic birds coming here to nest once numbered in the thousands.

Humboldt penguins -- which nest only in parts of Chile and Peru -- over the years have become decimated by human encroachment, rat infestations and unforgiving weather currents carried by unusually warm El Nino ocean temperatures, naturalists said.

China is rapidly assuming a global leadership role on climate change alongside the United States, a new study said Monday, but it warned greenhouse gas emissions worldwide continue to rise strongly.

The report by the independent Australian-based Climate Commission, "The Critical Decade: International Action on Climate Change" presents an overview of action in the last nine months.

India will receive normal monsoon rains this year, the government said on Friday, boosting prospects of a stronger performance this year by Asia's third-largest economy.

The pounding rains that sweep across the continent from June to September are dubbed the "economic lifeline" of India, which is one of the world's leading producers of rice, sugar, wheat and cotton.

Poaching on an "industrial" scale has slashed the elephant population in the countries of central Africa by nearly two-thirds, a group of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) said on Friday.

"A recent study shows that the population of forest elephants has dropped by almost two-thirds or 62 percent in the past 10 years, victims of large-scale ivory poaching," the group of eight NGOs said in a statement.

An unmanned cargo vehicle on Friday successfully docked with the International Space Station, in a delicate manoeuvre after its navigation antenna failed to properly deploy following launch, Russian mission control and NASA said.

Russian cosmonauts Roman Romanenko and Pavel Vinogradov first oversaw a so-called partial "soft docking" of the Progress craft at 1225 GMT, careful to make sure the unopened antenna did not cause any damage.

Some 7,000 light years away, Einstein's theory of general relativity has stood up to its most intense test yet, scientists said on Thursday.

The project involved observing a massive, fast-spinning star called a pulsar, and its companion white dwarf -- a smaller but very dense star that is dying, having lost most of its outer layers -- doing a dizzying orbital dance.

Ukrainians on Friday lit candles and laid flowers to remember the victims of the world's worst nuclear disaster at Chernobyl 27 years ago, as engineers pressed on with efforts to construct a new shelter to permanently secure the stricken reactor.

An explosion during testing in the early hours of April 26, 1986, sent radioactive fallout into the atmosphere that spread across Europe, particularly contaminating Belarus, Ukraine and Russia.

European scientists said Thursday that a new laboratory experiment shows the Earth's core is likely much hotter than last reported 20 years ago.

It's not that the iron core of our planet has warmed, but rather that the technique used to estimate its heat previously was flawed, researchers said in the journal Science.

Scientists at the world's biggest atom smasher have found further reasons for the apparent lack of antimatter in the universe.

A team working with data from CERN's Large Hadron Collider says it has discovered a particle that decays unevenly into matter and antimatter.

The discovery of the DNA double helix 60 years ago proved to be a headache for the Nobel organisation as the feat became nominated for prizes in different categories at the same time, Nature reported on Wednesday.

Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins of Britain and James Watson of the United States shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1962, nine years after revealing that the code for life has a spiral-staircase structure joined by chemical rungs.