With temperatures rising faster in the Alps than the rest of the world, alpine countries are working together to adapt to climate change and hope to set an example.

A recent Austrian climate change report found that the country's temperatures had risen twice as fast as the global average since 1880, with the number of sunshine hours in the Alps increasing by 20 percent.

Bad weather will delay the launch of a Japanese space probe on a six-year mission to mine a distant asteroid, just weeks after a European spacecraft's historic landing on a comet captivated the world.

Hayabusa2 had been set to blast off aboard Japan's main H-IIA rocket from Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan on Sunday.

A snapshot of what scientists are saying about climate change ahead of the next round of U.N. talks opening in Lima on Monday.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon basin dropped by 18 percent over the past year, the government said Wednesday, but the official figures were at odds with a conservation group's findings.

Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said deforestation from August 2013 to July 2014 totaled 4,848 square kilometers (1,870 square miles), the second-lowest figure on record.

India's environment court has slammed the government over the capital's horrendous air pollution, which it said was "getting worse" every day, and ordered a string of measures to bring it down.

The National Green Tribunal directed all vehicles older than 15 years be taken off New Delhi roads, pollution checks undertaken for all state-run buses and air purifiers installed at the city's busy markets.

Harry Potter swoops around on his broom, faces the bully Malfoy and later runs into a three-headed dog. For scientists studying brain activity while reading, it's the perfect excerpt from the young wizard's many adventures to give their subjects.

Reading that section of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" activates some of the same regions in the brain that people use to perceive real people's actions and intentions. Scientists then map what a healthy brain does as it reads.

DNA molecules attached to the outside of a rocket may be able survive a trip to suborbital space and back into the Earth's atmosphere at extremely high temperatures, according to a study Wednesday.

The experiment, carried out on the TEXUS-49 rocket mission in March 2011, "showed that DNA could be recovered from all application sites on the exterior of the rocket," according to the study published in PLOS ONE journal.

The first 3-D printer in space has popped out its first creation.

The 3-D printer delivered to the International Space Station two months ago made a sample replacement part for itself this week. It churned out a new faceplate for the print head casing.

It seemed like an open-and-shut case -- a beach mystery that a 10-year-old detective with an ice cream and some time on his hands could figure out.

For the better part of a decade, hundreds of harbor porpoises washed up along the southeastern coastline of the North Sea.

Dr. Denham Harman, a renowned scientist who developed a prominent theory on aging that's now used to study cancer, Alzheimer's disease and other illnesses, has died in Nebraska at age 98.

Harman, who worked into his mid-90s at the hospital in Omaha after a brief illness, medical center spokesman Tom O'Connor said.