A huge whale was stranded Friday on a white sand beach on Nicaragua's southern Pacific coast, despite efforts by dozens of tourists and residents to get it back to sea.

The whale, estimated at 18 meters (59 feet) long, beached itself Friday morning at Popoyo beach, in the town of Tola, some 111 kilometers (70 miles) south of the capital, according to the Environment Ministry's delegate in the region, Mario Rodriguez.

A Sino-U.S. breakthrough on curbing carbon emissions proves a global deal on climate change is achievable, U.S. President Barack Obama said Saturday, as campaigners hailed new momentum in long-stalled talks.

Announcing a $3 billion contribution to a U.N.-backed climate change mitigation fund, Obama said the China-U.S. deal unveiled earlier this week showed the way forward.

Robot probe Philae uploaded a slew of last-minute data to Earth Friday from a comet in deep space, before going to sleep at the end of its historic mission, ground controllers said.

Data streamed in as soon as Europe's pioneering robot lab reestablished late-night contact with its orbiting mothership, Rosetta, but its limited battery soon started wavering.

Lightning strikes in the United States will likely increase by nearly 50 percent by the end of the century as the world gets warmer and wetter, a new study says.

While those conditions were already known to promote thunderstorms in general, the new work focused on lightning strikes themselves.

The European Space Agency says its Philae lander is doing well and has succeeded in planting a thermometer in the comet where it touched down this week.

The agency said Friday that scientists have received a steady stream of data from the lander, which on Wednesday became the first spacecraft to touch down on a comet. However, their job is complicated by the fact that Philae landed next to a cliff that is blocking sunlight from its solar panels.

This week's China-U.S. climate agreement between the world's top two polluters puts pressure on India, No. 3 on the list, to become more energy efficient and should encourage investment in renewable energy.

But the pact is also a relief for India because it acknowledges the long-held view among developing economies that industrialized nations have been emitting heat-trapping gases for many more decades and so should shoulder more of the burden for tackling climate change. Emerging economies argue they should have fewer constraints to pollute as they grow.

Technology giant Google has taken the battle against illegal fishing online, with the company unveiling a tool in Australia on Friday that harnesses satellite data to track thousands of boats in real time.

A prototype interactive tool, which was developed in conjunction with environmental activists SkyTruth and marine advocacy group Oceana, was unveiled at the once-a-decade World Parks Congress in Sydney.

A dinosaur tooth found in Malaysia is at least 140 million years old and belongs to a new species within the "bird-hipped" Ornithischian order, researchers said Thursday.

While still unsure of the exact species of dinosaur, lead researcher Masatoshi Sone from the University of Malaya said the discovery means "it is plausible that large dinosaur fossil deposits still remain in Malaysia".

European scientists were hoping for a stream of data Thursday after a robot lab made the first-ever landing on a comet, a key step in a marathon mission to probe the mysteries of space.

Operation chiefs in Darmstadt, Germany, on Wednesday said the lander Philae failed to anchor to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on landing, but still managed to send back scientific information.

Australia was under pressure Thursday to follow the United States and China and ramp up efforts to combat climate change, as it prepared to host world leaders at the G20 summit.

The surprise deal between the world's two biggest polluters to curb greenhouse gas emissions was announced in Beijing on Wednesday, in a move hailed as a potential breakthrough in the long fight for a global pact.