Among the more peculiar organisms that inhabit our Earth exists a bacterium that turns water-soluble gold into microscopic nuggets of solid gold, scientists said Sunday.

Chemists have often pondered why the germ Delftia acidovorans is frequently found on the surface of tiny gold nuggets.

The suffocating smog that blanketed swathes of China is now hitting parts of Japan, sparking warnings Monday of health fears for the young and the sick.

The environment ministry's website has been overloaded as worried users log on to try to find out what is coming their way.

Engulfed by a raging torrent of water last week, the town of Chokwe in southern Mozambique was all but destroyed for the second time in 13 years, but it emerged with a hugely lower death toll.

As in 2000 when floods of biblical proportions claimed 800 lives, an underdeveloped network of dams and dykes allowed the swollen Limpopo River to burst its banks, submerging most of the province of Gaza, where Chokwe is located, under meters (feet) of water.

Australia experienced its hottest month on record in January, despite floods and storms that devastated parts of the country's east, officials said.

The Bureau of Meteorology said both the average mean temperature of 29.68 degrees Celsius (85.42 degrees Fahrenheit) and the average mean maximum temperature of 36.92 Celsius surpassed previous records set in January 1932.

U.S. medical specialists from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have figured out how owls can almost fully rotate their heads - by as much as 270 degrees in either direction.

The birds do so while hunting without damaging the delicate blood vessels in their necks and heads, and without cutting off blood supply to their brains.

Australia insisted Friday that protecting the Great Barrier Reef was a top priority, but conservationists WWF said not enough had been done to prevent UNESCO deeming it a world heritage site "in danger".

In June, UNESCO demanded decisive action from Australia to protect the world's largest coral reef from a gas and mining boom and increasing coastal development, or risk the embarrassment of seeing it put on the danger list.

Arnold Schwarzenegger called Thursday for an end to "doom and gloom" environmentalism as he hosted the first conference of his new green movement fostering action by local governments and individuals.

"If we want to inspire the world, it is time for us to forget about the old way of talking about climate change, where we crush people, where we overwhelm people with data," the former California governor, bodybuilder and film star said.

A team of international researchers has decoded the genome of the pigeon, 5,000 years after it was first domesticated, according to a study published Thursday.

Known as Columba livia, the rock pigeon is considered among the most common and varied species on the planet, consisting of 350 breeds with a slew of different features, and is among just a few bird genomes sequenced so far.

A Russian rocket carrying a U.S. telecommunications satellite plunged into the Pacific Ocean on Friday only moments after being launched from a mobile sea platform.

"There was an accident during the Zenit rocket launch," a source at the Energia corporation that makes the Zenit-3SL rocket used to launch the Intelsat satellite said by telephone.

The EU urged national governments on Thursday to ban pesticides deemed dangerous to bees by scientific experts in a bid to prevent a disastrous collapse in colony numbers for an insect considered vital to the integrity of the human food chain.

European Commission spokesman Frederic Vincent said the European Union executive had proposed a "two-year ban" on the use of three so-called neonicotinoid insecticides used in maize, rapeseed, sunflower and cotton cultivation.