Hundreds of the world's top marine scientists have called for Western Australia to ditch its shark cull policy, arguing there is no evidence that it makes beaches safer, a report said Friday.

The controversial catch and kill policy was introduced as a trial this year around popular west coast beaches following a spate of fatal attacks.

Japanese scientists say they have found a way to slow down the aging process in flowers by up to a half, meaning bouquets could remain fresh for much longer.

Researchers at the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Tsukuba, east of Tokyo, said they had found the gene believed to be responsible for the short shelf-life of flowers in one Japanese variety of morning glory.

Terrified of spiders? Then get down and personal with the venomous beasts at one of New York's top museums as it debunks the Hollywood myth that they're dangerous.

Arachnophobia, the excessive fear of spiders, is one of the most common animal phobias -- felt by millions of people worldwide.

The man who designed China's Jade Rabbit moon rover hopes a more advanced version of his creation will be sent to Mars, state media reported, underscoring Beijing's increasingly ambitious space program.

Jia Yang also told the official Xinhua news agency of his despair when the lunar rover lost contact with Earth six weeks after it was deployed on the moon's surface.

Tibetans are able to live at high altitude thanks to a special gene they inherited from a mysterious, now-extinct branch of the human family, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The ancestors of today's Tibetans acquired a key variant of a gene regulating oxygen in the blood when they mated with a species of human called the Denisovans, they said.

A U.S.-based Japanese scientist said Wednesday he has succeeded in engineering a version of the so-called swine flu virus that would be able to evade the human immune system.

The research on the 2009 H1N1 virus at a high-security lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has not yet been published, but was first made public July 1 by the Independent newspaper in London.

Oil extended losses in Asia Thursday on prospects that Libya will begin exporting more crude into a global market flush with supplies, while easing concerns about the Iraqi crisis also weighed on prices. 

U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) for August delivery eased 47 cents to $104.01 while Brent crude for August was down 33 cents at $110.91 in late-morning trade. 

Two years after making history by unearthing the Higgs boson, the particle that confers mass, physicists are broadening their probe into its identity, hoping this will also solve other great cosmic mysteries.

Sifting through mountains of experimental data, they have now pieced together a partial sketch of the evasive boson's traits and behavior.

A rocket carrying a NASA satellite lit up the pre-dawn skies Wednesday on a mission to track the chief culprit behind global warming.

The Delta 2 rocket blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base along the central California coast and speeded toward low-Earth orbit. It was to separate from the global warming satellite about an hour after liftoff.

Caribbean coral reefs could disappear within 20 years as overfishing has all but wiped out the fish that feast on coral-smothering algae, the U.N. and an international conservation watchdog warned Wednesday.

Just a sixth of the original coral cover exists today in the region, which is home to nine percent of the world's coral reefs, according to study by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the U.N.'s environment agency.