Sri Lanka's largest safari park banned the use of cell phones Monday to stop leopards and other wildlife being killed by speeding vehicles which have been tipped off about their whereabouts.
Rangers have found the bodies of several animals in recent months that have been run over by vehicles in Yala park, home to the world's highest concentration of leopards and large numbers of elephants, bears and deer.

It's constantly hissing, fussing and belching, but every half hour or so Yasur volcano sends up a tremendous spurt of lava and a boom so loud it is deafening on the crater rim and can be heard for miles. At dusk, the explosions begin to resemble fireworks, the lava glittering as it falls from the sky.
At just 361 meters (1,184 feet) elevation, the volcano on the Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu is particularly accessible, and spectacularly active. Some have dubbed it the world's friendliest volcano, although its primal ferocity and occasionally dangerous eruptions of lava and gas would seem to defy that description.

A cluster of submerged volcanoes has been discovered off Sydney, scientists said Monday, with the potential to help unlock the secrets of the sea floor between Australia and New Zealand.
The four extinct volcanoes were found about 250 kilometers (150 miles) offshore from Australia's biggest city last month during a search for larval lobster breeding grounds.

Ten endangered Asiatic lions, 1670 blue bulls and 87 spotted deer were amongst hundreds of wild animals killed in the recent floods to hit west India's Gujarat, a government report said Sunday.
The flash floods that hit Saurashtra region of the state in late June also killed at least 55 people with thousands evacuating their homes for safer areas after heavy rains.

There's a near-perfect heart shape on Pluto's rusty red surface. The dwarf planet is dotted with bright points which may be ice caps, and a mysterious dark shape nicknamed "The Whale."
Scientists are seeing all this for the first time as a piano-sized NASA spacecraft, called New Horizons, hurtles toward the distant celestial body on its way toward a historic flyby on July 14.

More than 10,000 fish died in temporary holding tanks in Brazil during construction of what is being touted as the world's largest freshwater aquarium, local media reported.
Prosecutors in Campo Grande, the capital of Mato Grosso do Sul state, are probing who is at fault after the local government and the company that dealt with the fish blamed each other.
The sun-powered Solar Impulse 2 aircraft has been grounded in Hawaii, its crew said Saturday, after a grueling five-day, fuel-less flight across the Pacific Ocean overheated its batteries.
The airplane took 118 hours to cross from Japan to Hawaii in the most perilous leg of its goal to circumnavigate the globe without a drop of fuel.

To the untrained eye, it's just a lot of birds on an otherwise deserted stretch of muddy, flat coastline. But for ornithologists, North Korea's west coast is a little piece of paradise each spring — and both the birds and a dedicated group of birdwatchers travel a long way to get there.
While North Korea is wary of letting foreigners inside its borders, a recent trip by a New Zealand research team to the mudflats near Nampo, southwest of the capital, Pyongyang, underscores some tentative but significant progress by outside scientists to conduct small-scale research projects — as long as they don't rub up against sensitive topics and are seen as useful to North Korea itself.

Giant pandas are the new couch potatoes of the animal world, according to a study Thursday that found the bears are just as sluggish as slow-moving sloths.
Researchers in China tracked five captive pandas and three wild ones for the study published in the journal Science.

The governor of California has likened the state of the planet to the Titanic in an attempt to drive home his growing fears about climate change.
"A lot of people are asleep, they are on the Titanic and they drink champagne, while we are about to crash," Jerry Brown, whose state is struggling to cope with a historic drought that many blame on climate change, told the Climate Summit of the Americas.
