One of California's worst droughts in decades could cost the US state's farmers $1.7 billion, a study warned, a week after alarmingly early wildfires forced tens of thousands of homeowners to evacuate.

The drought could leave 14,500 workers without jobs in California's Central Valley, known as America's food basket for providing vast supplies of fruit, vegetables and meat.

Sea level rise is threatening the majority of NASA's launch pads and multi-billion dollar complexes famous for training astronauts and launching historic missions to space, scientists said on Tuesday.

From Cape Canaveral in Florida to mission control in Houston, the U.S. space agency is busily building seawalls where possible and moving some buildings further inland.

Under the cover of night, activists patrol key poaching sites in southeast Cyprus, described as an ecological disaster zone for endangered migratory birds on their Mediterranean stopover.

A South African animal rights group on Tuesday accused an elephant park of cruelty after "horrific" video footage emerged of abusive training methods used on baby elephants.

"The footage shows elephant calves and juvenile elephants being chained, roped and stretched, shocked with electric cattle prods and hit with bull hooks," the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) said.

Britain is offering 10 million pounds (almost $17 million) to whoever can solve one of humanity's biggest scientific challenges — once the public has decided what it is.

The Longitude Prize is inspired by a 1714 contest to find a way of pinpointing a ship's location at sea. John Harrison's winning invention, the marine chronometer, revolutionized navigation.

The commercial cargo ship Dragon returned to Earth from the International Space Station on Sunday, bringing back nearly 2 tons of science experiments and old equipment for NASA.

SpaceX's Dragon splashed into the Pacific, just five hours after leaving the orbiting lab.

Objects that crashed to the ground in China have been identified as space debris, state media reported, after a Russian rocket carrying a communications satellite fell back to Earth minutes after lift-off.

Qiqihar city in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, which borders Russia's far east, reported that several objects appeared to have fallen from the sky on Friday, the Xinhua news agency said.

The U.S. government is stepping up efforts to help Central American farmers fight a devastating coffee disease — and hold down the price for a cup of coffee.

At issue is a fungus called coffee rust that has caused more than $1 billion in damage across Latin America. The fungus is especially deadly to Arabica coffee, the bean that makes up most high-end, specialty coffees.

The choppers swoop in, dumping insecticide over a plague-stricken village in Madagascar's stunning central highlands.

"The goal is to break the invasion," explains Tsitohaina Andriamaroahina, head of a U.N. mission to end a locust plague threatening the crops of 13 million farmers on this island nation.

Paleontologists in Argentina's remote Patagonia region have discovered fossils of what was likely the largest dinosaur ever to roam the earth.

The creature is believed to be a new species of Titanosaur, a long-necked, long-tailed sauropod that walked on four legs and lived some 95 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period.