A young female researcher is readying to fight claims her ground-breaking stem cell study was fabricated, her lawyer said Tuesday, as Japan's male-dominated scientific establishment circled its wagons.

Haruko Obokata, 30, was admitted to hospital on Monday because her "mental and physical condition is unstable," her lawyer Hideo Miki told reporters.

The head of the United Nations scientific panel on climate change has urged governments to "exercise a high level of enlightenment" in order to bridge their differences over how to stave off the worst global warming scenarios.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri told governments and scientists on Monday that their task at the week-long meeting in Berlin is to agree on a "robust, policy-relevant and informative document" in order to keep global temperature increases below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) by the end of the century.

An awe-inspiring Nazi defense line in western Poland has taken on a new role in peacetime as home to tens of thousands of bats in what is Europe's largest artificial roost.

The 37,000 winged mammals sleep elbow-to-elbow in the well-sheltered tunnels of the Ostwall fortification, a largely forgotten war site near the town of Miedzyrzecz, not far from the German border.

Thousands took to the streets of Romania on Sunday to protest against plans by U.S. energy giant Chevron to drill for shale gas.

"Chevron U.S., you can't just drop in uninvited and leave death in your wake", read some banners in Bucharest where hundreds of people gathered in the capital's University square.

A week after publishing the starkest warning yet on the risks of climate change, U.N. experts meet in Berlin from Monday to assess options for limiting the threat.

A draft of the report, seen by Agence France Presse, suggests there is a 15-year window for feasible and affordable action to safely reach the U.N.-targeted global warming limit.

A volcano in central Ecuador spewed up a column of hot ash and smoke 10 kilometers (six miles) high on Friday, increasing fears of an eruption.

Activity has been building at the Tungurahua volcano 130 kilometers south of the capital Quito since early February, and on Friday experts reported a loud explosion "that lasted for five minutes" and an expulsion of ash.

Saturn's moon Enceladus is home to an ocean of melted water beneath its surface, and could be a source for alien microbes, scientists said Thursday.

The first measurements of the subsurface water at the south pole of the small and icy moon were made by the U.S. space agency's Cassini spacecraft, and are described in the journal Science.

The space consortium Arianespace has successfully launched a rocket that lofted the first Earth-observation satellite for a new European project.

The Sentinel-1A satellite was launched into orbit by a Soyuz rocket on Thursday evening from a spaceport in French Guiana. The rocket's flight lasted 23 minutes.

An international exhibition in New York explores the fascinating world of prehistoric flying reptiles, the pterosaurs who ruled the skies when dinosaurs ruled the earth millions of years ago.

"Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs," opens on Saturday and runs until January 2015 at the American Museum of Natural History, co-curated with an expert from Brazil.

The Moon was formed about 95 million years after the birth of our Solar System, in a collision that also settled the structure of Earth as we know it, according to the latest attempt at dating that impact.

A study in the journal Nature said the crash between an early, proto-Earth and a Mars-sized object that dislodged what would become the Moon, happened some 4.470 billion years ago -- give or take 32 million years.