At 10:25 a.m., a dark brown eye was removed from a man whose lids had closed for the last time. Five hours later, the orb was staring up at the ceiling from a stainless steel tray in an operating room with two blind patients — both waiting to give it a second life.

S.P.D. Siriwardana, 63, remained still under a white sheet as the surgeon delicately replaced the cornea that had gone bad in his right eye following a cataract surgery. Across the room, patient A.K. Premathilake, 32, waited for the sclera, the white of the eye, to provide precious stem cells and restore some vision after acid scalded his sight away on the job.

A month ago, a young seal named Marco washed up on a beach on the northern Dutch Frisian island of Ameland, one of a growing number of recently stranded pups that has left his rescuers worried.

Cold, hungry and riddled with parasites, Marco was taken to the Zeehondencreche (seal nursery), the country's oldest and largest seal rehabilitation center on the Dutch north coast.

Scientists have discovered a new flowering plant belonging to the scarce Medinilla group on Fiji's Kadavu island, the International Union for Conservation of Nature said on Friday.

"Although the plant was first found in August of 2010, it has taken this long to go through the process and verify it," IUCN spokeswoman Ewa Ewa Magiera told Agence France Presse.

Two Dutch men were arrested after police discovered 40 boxes filled with animal bones, including those of a rare snow leopard, in the northeastern city of Emmen, a police spokesman said Friday.

"Police received a tip-off about the men and when they searched two homes on Thursday, they found chimpanzee, crocodile and hippopotamus skeletons and even the skull of rare snow leopard, as well as ivory," Ron Reinds told Agence France Presse.

A substance found in nuts and whole grains may someday help doctors fight the kind of food poisoning that sickened thousands of people in Europe last summer, a study in mice suggests.

While a variety of germs can cause food poisoning, the European outbreak involved a dangerous strain of the bacterium E. coli. It infects people and pumps out a poison called Shiga toxin. Some other bacteria also produce this toxin, which overall causes more than 1 million deaths a year worldwide. The European food poisoning outbreak included about 4,000 people and 50 deaths.

The world last year was not quite as warm as it has been for most of the past decade, government scientists said Thursday, but it continues a general trend of rising temperatures.

The average global temperature was 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit (14.4 Celsius), making 2011 the 11th hottest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. That's 0.9 degrees (0.5 C) warmer than the 20th century average, officials said. In fact, it was hotter than every year last century except 1998.

Scientists working in the dense jungles of Indonesia have "rediscovered" a large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct.

They were all the more baffled to find the Miller's Grizzled Langur — its black face framed by a fluffy, Dracula-esque white collar — in an area well outside its previously recorded home range.

Many male birds use their flashy colored feathers to lure females, but the great bowerbird of Australia has mastered the art of illusion to captivate the ladies, researchers said Thursday.

Part architect, part magician, the great bowerbird constructs an elaborate arched walkway called a bower made from twigs.

It's high noon for the humble leap second.

After ten years of talks, governments are headed for a showdown vote this week on an issue that pits technological precision against nature's whims.

Russia will look into the possibility that a U.S. radar station could have inadvertently interfered with the failed Mars moon probe that plummeted to Earth, Russian media reported Tuesday, but experts argued that any such claims were far-fetched.

NASA spokesman Bob Jacobs also said the U.S. space agency was not using the military radar equipment in question at the time of the Russian equipment failure, but instead was using radar in the Mojave desert in the western United States and in Puerto Rico.