They have their own lights, teeth, and weird names like vampire squid, stoplight loosejaws, and bristlemouth -- meet the weird denizens of the deep surfacing for an exhibition in New York starting this week.

The American Museum of Natural History's "Creatures of Light: Nature's Bioluminescence," which opens Saturday, takes a look at the phenomenon of wildlife that produces light, especially inhabitants of the furthest reaches of the oceans.

North Korea says it aims to estimate crop production and analyze natural resources when it launches a satellite on a long-range rocket next month.

The United States and South Korea view the launch as a cover for testing long-range missile technology.

A village in northwestern France has come up with an innovative way to cut back on local rubbish production -- offering each home two free chickens to consume organic waste.

The village of Pince, population 200, in the Sarthe region came up with the idea in a bid to cut waste-collection costs and help local families dealing with the economic crisis, mayor Lydie Pasteau told Agence France Presse.

Critically-endangered orangutans in a protected area of Indonesia will be wiped out by the end of the year if land clearing is not stopped, a coalition of environmental groups warned Wednesday.

The government must immediately halt the clearance of forest in the 13,000-hectare (32,000 acres) peat swamps in Tripa, Aceh province, the groups, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth said.

The world's cities face the brunt of climate change but some are starting to respond vigorously to the threat, experts say at a conference here staged ahead of the June Rio summit.

NASA launched five rockets early Tuesday to measure a high-altitude jet stream some 65 miles (105 kilometers) above the Earth's surface, far higher than most planes fly, the US space agency said.

The rockets, known as the Anomalous Transport Rocket Experiment (ATREX) were to release a chemical that leaves a milky-white trail allowing observers on Earth to "see" the winds in space and track them with cameras, it said.

Man's catastrophic damage to the environment and disparities between rich and poor head the daunting challenges facing the Rio Summit in June, experts said on Monday.

The summit must sweep away a system that lets reckless growth destroy the planet's health yet fails to help billions in need, they said.

The 2010 BP oil spill that spewed from a broken well on the Gulf of Mexico sea floor damaged coral as far as seven miles (11 kilometers) away, according to a scientific study published on Monday.

A team of U.S. researchers used underwater vehicles and a process called two-dimensional gas chromatography to match the source of the petroleum hydrocarbons they found with those that emerged from the BP spill.

The Academy of Natural Sciences has never been one to brag.

Its 225,000 annual visitors may associate the oldest natural history museum in the U.S. solely with dioramas and dinosaurs, but behind the scenes there is groundbreaking research conducted by world-renowned scientists and an enviable collection of some 18 million specimens representing all manner of animal, vegetable and mineral.

The memories of a World War II-era Marine have renewed hopes of solving one of the greatest archaeological mysteries — the whereabouts of the lost Peking Man fossils, South African and Chinese scientists said.

In the March edition of a scientific journal published by Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, renowned South African paleontologist Lee Berger and two Chinese colleagues say the fossils may be lying under a parking lot in China's northern port city of Qinhuangdao where the Marine said he saw two crates of bones in 1947.