A federal appeals court on Monday cleared the path for seismic testing off the coast of New Jersey that will blast the floor of the Atlantic Ocean with loud noises as part of a climate change research project.

The 3rd Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals rejected New Jersey's request to block the testing off Long Beach Island, which aims to use acoustic research to examine sediment dating back tens of millions of years. The barrier island stretches along the central New Jersey coast for about 18 miles.

The SpaceX company has launched a rocket packed with communication satellites.

The Falcon rocket blasted off Monday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. On board were six advanced satellites for the New Jersey-based Orbcomm. Eleven more of these satellites are to be launched in the coming year.

It's nursing season in Europe's biggest marine sanctuary and schools of whales have brought their young to Italian shores -- but environmentalists warn they are at risk from toxins leaked by the wrecked Costa Concordia cruise ship.

The luxury liner crashed off the Tuscan island of Giglio in 2012, killing 32 people and sparking an unprecedented salvage operation set to conclude this month with the floated wreck being towed more than 200 nautical miles north to the port of Genoa to be scrapped.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday named former Irish president Mary Robinson as his special envoy for climate change, ahead of a summit set for September.

Robinson will seek to "mobilize political will and action" ahead of the special summit of heads of state and government, called by Ban, to be held in New York on September 23, the U.N. said.

Goma, a city in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, sits by one of the world's largest freshwater reservoirs and has some of Africa's heaviest annual rainfall, yet it is a thirsty place.

Most of the city's one million residents, living close to the shores of Lake Kivu, have to struggle every day to fetch water home.

The operation to refloat the wreck of Italy's Costa Concordia cruise ship due to begin on Monday is the biggest salvage project of its kind ever attempted.

Here are some facts and figures about the 114,500-ton hulk and how salvage workers are planning to float it:

Greenhouse gases and depletion of the ozone layer are causing southern Australia to become drier, researchers reported on Sunday.

Scientists at the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said that southern Australia suffered a decline in rainfall that began around 1970 and increased over the next four decades.

Orbital Sciences Corporation on Sunday launched its unmanned Cygnus cargo carrier on a journey to resupply the astronauts living aboard the International Space Station.

The spacecraft lifted off from Wallops Island, Virginia at 12:52 pm (1652 GMT) aboard a gleaming white Antares rocket. 

Thailand faces an international wildlife trade ban unless it reins in its illegal ivory sector, which is a magnet for traffickers, global regulator CITES said on Friday.

"There have been years without any real action on the ground when it comes to controlling the illegal ivory market, be it illegal imports or trade within Thailand," said Oeystein Stoerkersen, chairman of CITES' governing body.

Unseasonably cool weather will arrive next week in the Midwest and as far south as Arkansas and Oklahoma.

It is not, however, the second coming of a polar vortex, a phrase the National Weather Service's Chicago office tweeted earlier this week to describe the upcoming sweater weather. The office quickly learned that wasn't such a good idea, said Amy Seeley, a weather service meteorologist who spent a good chunk of Friday morning fielding a flood of telephone calls from the media.