The governor of California declared an emergency as crews scrambled to contain an oil slick and clean up popular beaches after a pipeline rupture dumped thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean.

A day after the spill near Santa Barbara, northwest of Los Angeles, the U.S. Coast Guard said helicopter overflights had shown the slick stretched some nine miles (14 kilometers) along the Pacific Ocean coast.

The U.S. Air Force launched its robotic space plane into orbit for a fourth flight on Wednesday aboard an Atlas 5 rocket, in a mission aimed at testing a new engine to steer satellites, officials said.

The rocket carrying the X-37B successfully lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida and officials said the scheduled return of the unmanned plane had yet to be determined.

Japan's zoos and aquariums were expected to decide Wednesday whether to remain part of a global body that suspended them over their use of dolphins caught by the controversial drive hunt method.

Last month, the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA) voted to suspend its Japanese chapter (JAZA), saying it had refused to stop taking dolphins caught in Taiji in southern Japan.

Elite athletes are blessed with an area of the brain that performs 82 percent faster than average under intense pressure, a study published on Wednesday claims.

A series of tests commissioned by Dunlop Tyres in conjunction with University College London (UCL) found that extreme sportsmen and women performed significantly better under physical and mental duress than members of the public.

When Japanese researchers said earlier this year that eating whale meat could help prevent dementia and memory loss, the news provoked snorts of derision -- it couldn't be real science, went the retort.

Despite protestations of academic rigour from the men and women who do the work, anything involving the words "Japan", "whaling" and "research" suffers from a credibility gap in the court of global public opinion.

Chinese companies have been illegally fishing off the coast of West Africa, environmental campaign group Greenpeace said in a study Wednesday, at times sending incorrect location data suggesting they are as far away as Mexico.

The number of Chinese-flagged or Chinese-owned fishing boats operating in Africa has soared in recent decades, from just 13 in 1985 to 462 in 2013, the international advocacy group said.

Indian wildlife lovers have launched a campaign to move a tiger back to the wildlife reserve where he grew up after he was placed in captivity following the death of a forest guard.

The nine-year-old male, known as Ustad or Master, was taken from the Ranthambore National Park in northwestern India on Saturday and placed in an enclosure at a zoo 500 kilometers (310 miles) away.

A Japanese court upheld an injunction banning the restart of two nuclear reactors, a report said Tuesday, in a blow to the government's ambitions to return to atomic power generation.

Fukui District Court in central Japan dismissed Kansai Electric Power's motion for a stay on an earlier decision to temporarily bar the restart of the No. 3 and No. 4 reactors at plant in Takahama, Kyodo News said.

Russia's recent string of space failures -- including the embarrassing loss of a satellite after the rocket carrying it fell to Earth -- come as the country tries to restructure its ageing program.

Once the pride of the Soviet Union, the space sector was hit hard by the collapse of Communism.

Strapped into a seat in a tiny one-man cabin, Swiss pilot Andre Borschberg will have to endure extraordinary conditions as he flies over the Pacific Ocean for five days and nights, powered only by the sun.

Each day he will experience altitudes of 28,000 feet, akin to the world's highest peak, and temperature changes of 55 degrees C (almost 100 F) in the unpressurized, unheated Solar Impulse 2 cockpit.