China's river porpoises are rarer than pandas, but fishermen fighting to save them have been snared by a net of blackmail allegations, highlighting uncertainties faced by the country's emerging environmentalists.

Fewer than 1,000 finless porpoises -- grey dolphin-like animals with a hint of a grin on their bulbous faces -- are thought to remain in and around China's vast Yangtze river which carves through the center of the country.

Japan is looking at building a new base on Antarctica so scientists can study air trapped in ice a million years ago, in a bid to better understand climate change, an official said Monday.

Tokyo already has four stations on the frozen continent, two of which are currently in use -- the Syowa Station on the coast and the Dome Fuji Station inland.

A report that scientists are calling one of the most comprehensive studies of great white sharks finds their numbers are surging in the ocean off the Eastern U.S. and Canada after decades of decline.

The study by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, published this month in the journal PLOS ONE, says the population of the notoriously elusive fish has climbed since about 2000 in the western North Atlantic.

American astrophysicists who announced just months ago what they deemed a breakthrough in confirming how the universe was born now admit they may have got it wrong.

The team said it had identified gravitational waves that apparently rippled through space right after the Big Bang.

Construction on the world's largest optical telescope began with a bang Thursday, as workers demolished a hilltop in Chile's Atacama desert.

The European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) telescope, being built by the European Southern Observatory, aims to give astronomers new insight into the origins of the universe and help search for potentially habitable planets elsewhere in the galaxy.

In a skeleton more than 6,200 years old, scientists have found the earliest known evidence of infection with a parasitic worm that now afflicts more than 200 million people worldwide.

Archaeologists discovered a parasite egg near the pelvis of a child skeleton in northern Syria and say it dates back to a time when ancient societies first used irrigation systems to grow crops. Scientists suspect the new farming technique meant people were spending a lot of time wading in warm water — ideal conditions for the parasites to jump into humans. That may have triggered outbreaks of the water-borne flatworm disease known as schistosomiasis.

NASA is zeroing in on the asteroids it wants to capture, haul near the moon and have astronauts visit.

Officials on Thursday described a prime candidate: A tiny asteroid that whizzed about 7,600 miles (12,250 kilometers) above Earth in 2011.

The vicious fight for survival and power among disparate kingdoms and clans may have led some ancient people to evolve facial traits more quickly than others, a study said Thursday.

New research on 17 skulls from a collection of 430,000-year-old remains found at the base of an underground shaft in Spain suggests that big jaws were the first prominent feature of these pre-Neandertals.

Agriculture watchdogs in Brazil fear foreigners arriving for the World Cup could bring up to 350 new plant parasites into the country.

American tourists pose the biggest threat, since the United States has 225 agricultural parasites that do not currently exist in Brazil, said the National Plant Defense Association (Andef), an agro-industry umbrella group.

Australia Thursday called a decision by UNESCO to defer listing the Great Barrier Reef as in danger "a win for logic", but environmentalists said it was a final warning.

The U.N. cultural agency on Wednesday said the reef could be put on a list of endangered World Heritage Sites if more was not done to protect it.