French authorities are looking into how a lamb genetically modified with jellyfish protein was sold as meat to an unknown customer, a judicial source told Agence France Presse on Tuesday. 

The jellyfish-lamb, called "Rubis", was sent to an abattoir from the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Paris late last year and somehow ended up on a butcher's slab.

A solar-powered plane that has been trapped in Japan for three weeks by the rainy season is set to take off for Hawaii early Wednesday, the team said.

Solar Impulse 2 had been trying to fly from Nanjing, China to Hawaii, when a developing weather front forced it to divert to the central Japanese city of Nagoya at the start of the month.

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 early Monday.

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

Japan's chief whaling negotiator confirmed Monday its ships would return to the Antarctic this year, despite a call by global regulators to provide more evidence that the hunt has a scientific purpose.

Joji Morishita said the whole debate about whether or not Japan should be killing the mammals had long since moved away from science and into politics.

Europe's robot lab Philae phoned home on Friday after several days silence in its journey towards the Sun on the back of a comet and is "doing very well", the German Aerospace Center (DLR) said.

The latest contact lasted 19 minutes and is the third time that Philae has touched base with Earth since it landed on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on November 12 after piggybacking on its mothership Rosetta.

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) on Friday demanded that Japan provide more information to prove that its revised Antarctic whaling programme was for scientific research, saying it could not reach a consensus based on documents submitted.

The British-based IWC had been expected to judge whether Japan's "NEWREP-A proposal", which would target 3,996 minke whales over 12 years, had addressed the issues that led to its predecessor being ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The world's most endangered feline species, the Iberian lynx, is making a comeback in Spain after being pushed to the brink of extinction.

But the costly efforts to reintroduce the spotted cat into the wild face an unexpected enemy -- cars.

The more oil and gas companies pump their saltwater waste into the ground, and the faster they do it, the more they have triggered earthquakes in the central United States, a massive new study found.

An unprecedented recent jump in quakes in America's heartland can be traced to the stepped up rate that drilling wastewater is injected deep below the surface, according to a study in Thursday's journal Science that looked at 187,570 injection wells over four decades.

Green technology to turn fog into fresh water straight from the tap has put an end to exhausting daily treks to distant wells by village women in southwest Morocco.

Families in five highland Berber communities have begun to benefit from "fog harvesting", a technique devised in Chile two decades ago and since taken up in countries from Peru to Namibia and South Africa.

Global police have seized "huge amounts" of wildlife contraband, including 12 tons of ivory, rhino horn and whale bones, in a massive operation across 62 countries, Europol said on Thursday.

"Operation COBRA III, the biggest ever coordinated international law enforcement operation targeting the illegal trade in endangered species, has led to the recovery of a huge amount of wildlife contraband," Europe's police agency said in a statement.