Police in China's financial hub Shanghai took away at least three busloads of environmental protesters outside the municipal government Saturday, preventing the latest rally that started with a rumor that a petrochemical plant could move into the area.

Concerned with public health but shut out of decision-making, more affluent Chinese are increasingly taking to the streets to oppose potentially hazardous projects such as petrochemical plants. Authorities in turn have suppressed the assemblies that have in the past turned violent and weakened the authority of local governments.

Lions will return to Rwanda for the first time in more than two decades, wildlife officials have said, after the endangered animal was wiped out following Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

Seven lions -- two males and five females -- are being transported from South Africa and will arrive by air in Rwanda on Monday after a 36 hour journey, where they will be taken and released after two week quarantine into the eastern Akagera National Park.

An African rock python died in unusual circumstances after swallowing a giant 13.8 kilogram porcupine at a private game park in South Africa, the manager said Friday.

The 3.9 meter snake should have been able to cope with the porcupine no matter how prickly the quills, Lake Eland Game Reserve's Jennifer Fuller told Agence France Presse.

Fancy a meteor shower racing across the night sky to mark your birthday? One Japanese start-up is hoping to deliver shooting stars on demand and choreograph the cosmos.

And, say scientists, it's not just about painting huge pictures on the night-sky that would be visible to millions of people; artificial meteors could help us to understand a lot more about Earth's atmosphere.

A solar-powered plane attempting to fly around the world must cross the Pacific within a few weeks or it could remain stuck in Japan for a year, its pilot said in an interview published Thursday.

Solar Impulse 2, which has been stranded in Japan for three weeks and had to postpone a planned take off this week due to bad weather over the Pacific, only has a short window for making the next leg of its journey, one of its two pilots, Bertrand Piccard, told the Tribune de Geneve daily.

From flower emblazoned cemeteries to rooftop gardens and balconies, Norway's capital Oslo is creating a "bee highway" to protect endangered pollinators essential to food production. 

"We are constantly reshaping our environment to meet our needs, forgetting that other species also live in it," Agnes Lyche Melvaer, head of the Bybi, an environmental group supporting urban bees, which is leading the project. 

The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched the second phase of a 4.3-billion-euro ($4.91-billion) program to deploy new-generation satellites to monitor environmental damage and aid disaster relief operations, officials said.

Sentinel-2A was hoisted by a lightweight Vega rocket from ESA's base in Kourou, French Guiana, overnight Monday-Tuesday, launch operator Arianespace said.

The mighty lion, reclusive cave crabs and the world's rarest sea lion are among nearly 23,000 species at risk of dying out, a top conservation body warned on Tuesday.

In an update to its "Red List" of threatened species, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature hailed some clear advances in saving endangered species like the Iberian Lynx.

Fishermen off Australia who accidentally caught a whopping 6.3 metre basking shark have provided scientists with a rare opportunity to study the second-biggest fish on the planet.

Little is known about the species -- smaller only than the whale shark -- because it does not need to surface for air to survive and so is not often spotted. 

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced Tuesday that its historic comet-chasing mission Rosetta had been extended until the end of September 2016.

"ESA's Science Programme Committee has given formal approval to continue the mission for an additional nine months," ESA said.