France's space agency on Thursday unveiled a revised proposal for an Ariane rocket ahead of a tough decision on launchers by the European Space Agency (ESA).

Ministers must decide whether they can afford to fund the development of two projects for Europe's next rocket.

Chimpanzees can be lethally violent to each other but this stems from an inherent streak and not, as some have suggested, from human interference, a study said on Wednesday.

Zoologists, led by the famed Jane Goodall, have speculated for years on the causes of "chimpanzee wars" among Man's genetically-closest relatives.

Modern Europeans are descended from three major groups of ancient humans, not two as was previously thought, according to a gene analysis published on Wednesday.

Until now, the mainstream theory was that Europeans descended from early farmers who moved into Europe from the Middle East about 7,500 years ago, and local hunter-gatherers they interbred with.

A UN summit on climate change will see the world "change course" and begin to seriously tackle global warming, UN climate envoy Mary Robinson said Wednesday.

More than 120 leaders are to attend the summit on Tuesday called to inject new momentum in efforts to address climate change ahead of a crucial conference in Paris next year.

Disasters last year displaced three times more people than violent conflicts, showing the urgent need to improve resilience for vulnerable people when fighting climate change, according to a study issued Wednesday.

The Norwegian Refugee Council, an independent group that focuses on emergency aid, released the findings ahead of a United Nations summit on Tuesday aimed at building momentum for a global agreement on climate change.

It's like Florida's version of The Blob. Slow moving glops of toxic algae in the northeast Gulf of Mexico are killing sea turtles, sharks and fish, and threatening the waters and beaches that fuel the region's economy.

Known as "red tide," this particular strain called Karenia brevis is present nearly every year off Florida, but large blooms can be particularly devastating. Right now, the algae is collecting in an area about 60 miles wide and 100 miles long, about 5 to 15 miles off St. Petersburg in the south and stretching north to Florida's Big Bend, where the peninsula ends and the Panhandle begins.

NASA awarded multi-billion-dollar contracts to Boeing and SpaceX on Tuesday to build America's next spacecraft for carrying astronauts to the International Space Station by 2017.

The US space agency hailed the decision as another step toward ending America's reliance on Russian vehicles for access to low-Earth orbit.

Rising sea levels could threaten infrastructure worth more than Aus$226 billion (U.S.$205 billion) in Australia if climate change is left unchecked, a study warned Wednesday.

The Climate Council report said the most serious consequences of rising seas would be an increase in the frequency of coastal flooding and the retreat of shorelines.

NASA's effort to identify potentially dangerous space rocks has taken a hit.

On Monday, the space agency's inspector general released a report blasting NASA's Near Earth Objects program, which is meant to hunt and catalog comets, asteroids and relatively large fragments of these objects that pass within 28 million miles of Earth. The purpose is to protect the planet against their potential dangers.

Indonesia's parliament on Tuesday voted to ratify a regional agreement on cross-border haze as fires ripped through forests in the west of the country, choking neighboring Singapore with hazardous smog.

Officials in Singapore and Malaysia have responded furiously to Indonesian forest fires, which have intensified and become more frequent in recent years.