European researchers said Monday they have devised the first tiny motion detector that could help find microscopic life forms on distant planets.

Until now, scientists have tried to find signs of extraterrestrial life by listening for sounds that might be emitted from an alien world, by scanning the skies with potent telescopes and by sending robotic probes and rovers to analyze the chemical fingerprint of samples from comets and planets.

A teenager who escaped a shark attack that killed his friend in western Australia has described how he fired his spear gun into the suspected great white as authorities searched for the animal Tuesday.

The victim, named by local media as 17-year-old Jay Muscat, died after he was bitten on the leg by a shark while spear-fishing off Cheynes Beach, near Albany in the southern tip of Western Australia (WA) state, on Monday.

An Australian ranger has captured the moment a python swallowed a wallaby at a national park in a giant feast that could keep it full for three months.

Ranger Paul O'Neill was patrolling Nitmiluk National Park in the Northern Territory when he heard numerous birds making alarm calls and came across the feeding frenzy.

Agreements on climate change -- to paraphrase what the 19th-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck said about law-making -- are like sausages.

It's best not to know how they are made.

A rare Sumatran tiger in the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo has killed and eaten her two five-week-old cubs in a blow to its captive breeding program, its chief vet said Monday.

The mother tiger, named Hana, had given birth to three cubs after being mated with a tiger from Germany called Avigdor, Nili Avni-Magen told Agence France Presse.

Japan's top research institute on Friday hammered the final nail in the coffin of what was once billed as a ground-breaking stem cell study, dismissing it as flawed and saying the work could have been fabricated.

The revelations come a week after a young researcher at the center of the scandal, which has rocked the country's scientific establishment, said she would resign after failing to reproduce the successful conversion of an adult cell into a stem cell-like state, known as "STAP" cells.

The presents are unwrapped. The children's shrieks of delight are just a memory. Now it's time for another Yuletide tradition: cleaning up the needles that are falling off your Christmas tree.

"I'm not particularly worried about it ... I'll just sweep it up," said Lisa Smith-Hansford of New York, who bought a small tree at a Manhattan sidewalk stand early this week. She likes the smell of a real tree, she said, comparing it to comfort food.

Japan's top research institute on Friday hammered the final nail in the coffin of what was once billed as a ground-breaking stem cell study, dismissing it as flawed and saying the work could have been fabricated.

The revelations come a week after a young researcher at the center of the scandal, which has rocked the country's scientific establishment, said she would resign after failing to reproduce the successful conversion of an adult cell into a stem cell-like state, known as "STAP" cells.

Dutch scientists are recreating the deaths of some of the world's most famous personalities by reconstructing their last moments using scents and sounds.

From the sweet smell of Jacqueline Kennedy's perfume mingled with the scent of John F. Kennedy's blood to Whitney Houston's last drug-fuelled moments in a Beverly Hills bathtub, scientists at Breda university say they offer visitors a unique, if somewhat macabre, historical snapshot.

Mexican authorities are proposing a $37 million plan to ban gillnet fishing in most of the upper Sea of Cortez to save the critically endangered vaquita marina, the world's smallest porpoise.

The plan would compensate fishermen for stopping the use of nets that often sweep up the tiny porpoises along with their catch.