An American probe that will explore Pluto woke up from its slumber Saturday, after a nine-year journey to take a close look at the distant body for the first time.

"New Horizons is healthy and cruising quietly through deep space, nearly three billion miles from home, but its rest is nearly over," said Alice Bowman, the craft's operations manager at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory outside Washington.

A pod of six sperm whales washed up dead Monday in a rare mass stranding on the South Australia coast, with animal welfare officials struggling over the logistics of handling the huge carcasses.

The whales, which can weigh up to 50 tonnes, were found at low tide by residents on Parara beach, about 150 kilometers (93 miles) northwest of Adelaide.

China is developing a huge rocket that will be used for its first manned mission to the moon, state media said Monday, underscoring Beijing's increasingly ambitious space program.

The first launch of the Long March-9 will take place around 2028, said the China Daily, which also cited experts saying the rocket's development is at the research stage.

Ministers and the U.N. chief fly into Lima this week to bolster negotiators in a final push for consensus on key elements of a world pact to curb potentially disastrous global warming.

With a week of talks gone, and five days left, parties remain deeply divided on key aspects of the deal they have committed to signing in Paris in December 2015, to take effect in 2020.

Developing countries may need up to $500 billion per year by 2050 to adapt to the ravages of climate change, dwarfing previous estimates, a U.N. report said Friday.

The figure was about 20 times today's public spending on climate adaptation, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) that warned of a "significant funding gap after 2020."

In a strikingly green corner of Mali, one man is leading an agricultural revolution, using organic farming methods to get the most out of the land -- and pass his techniques on to others in west Africa.

Oumar Diabate has established a reputation for raising chemical-free vegetables, fruit and medicinal plants at his small farm about 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the capital Bamako.

The effectiveness of the fishing watchdog in lucrative Pacific island waters was under scrutiny Saturday after talks aimed at protecting the region's valuable tuna stocks ended in stalemate.

Small Pacific island states and the powerful countries which fish in their waters were unable to agree on tuna conservation measures during a week of heavy talks at the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC) annual conference.

Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen urged patience Saturday as discontent over a drinking water crisis simmered in parts of the island nation following a fire that crippled a major desalination plant.

Much of the capital Male was still without drinking water on Saturday after a fire Thursday knocked out the desalination plant that supplies fresh to the densely populated capital.

That morning cup of coffee gives many of us a needed boost, but Central American coffee farmers have found a new source of energy in their beans: turning agricultural wastewater into biogas.

An often-overlooked byproduct of the world's favorite stimulant, the water used to process raw coffee beans is usually dumped back into the environment untreated.

Not many tourist spots boast of being dark and difficult to get to, but the Namib desert is one of a number of remote "Dark Sky Reserves" drawing in stargazers for a celestial safari.

In the cool night air, an urbane Austrian tourist climbs rocky steps behind a chic hotel lodge and peers into a matt-black metal cylinder containing a spine of mirrors and lenses that reveal the universe.