Will space historians one day say "Agilkia" with the same awe as they utter "Tranquility Base," where in 1969 Man first walked on the Moon?

Agilkia -- called after an island on the Nile -- has been selected as the name of the site for the first landing on a comet, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Tuesday.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Tuesday defended using coal to generate energy as "the foundation of our prosperity", after the United Nations warned that carbon emissions were leading to disaster.

U.N. climate experts said on Sunday that emissions of three key greenhouse gases were at their highest levels in more than 800,000 years and Earth was on track for temperatures to rise by at least four degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 over pre-industrial times.

Richard Branson, the British billionaire founder of Virgin Galactic, on Monday hit out against "self-proclaimed experts" asserting an explosion was behind the crash of the company's spacecraft in the U.S. last week.

Evidence showed there was "no explosion" behind the deadly crash last Friday of SpaceShipTwo, he told Sky News television.

Local legend has it that Pakistan's Indus River dolphin was once a woman, transformed by a curse from a holy man angry that she forgot to feed him one day.

After thousands of years swimming the mighty river the gentle, blind mammal is under threat from a combination of uncontrolled fishing and damage to its habitat caused by man-made dams.

Climate change is happening, it's almost entirely man's fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.'s panel on climate science said Sunday.

The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's giant climate assessment offered no surprises, nor was it expected to since it combined the findings of three reports released in the past 13 months.

Europe has an estimated 421 million fewer birds than three decades ago, and current treatment of the environment is unsustainable for many common species, a study released on Monday said.

The population crash is related to modern farming methods and the loss and damage of habitats, according to the study published in science journal Ecology Letters.

A bid by environmentalists to confront world leaders with a digital billboard highlighting climate change has been thwarted by Brisbane airport authorities who deemed the message too political.

Brisbane Airport will be the Australian gateway for leaders of 20 economies when they gather in the Queensland state capital next week for the annual G20 summit.

Investigators say Virgin Galactic's experimental spaceship broke apart in flight over California's Mojave Desert after a device to slow the craft's descent prematurely deployed.

National Transportation Safety Board acting chairman Christopher Hart said Sunday that while no cause for Friday's crash has been determined, investigators found the "feathering" system was activated before the craft reached the appropriate speed.

China on Saturday successfully recovered an experimental spacecraft that flew around the moon and back in a test run for the country's first unmanned return trip to the lunar surface.

The eight-day trip marked the first time in almost four decades that a spacecraft has returned to Earth after traveling around the moon. China plans to send a spacecraft to the moon in 2017 and have it return to Earth after collecting soil samples.

Australia said Saturday it was confident its plans for a marine reserve to protect biodiversity in East Antarctica would succeed next year, after international talks in Hobart failed to agree on the measure.

The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) meeting closed late Friday with the 25 members unable to reach consensus on two Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).