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Study: Southern Ocean Winds Strongest in 1,000 Years

Winds in the wild Southern Ocean are blowing at their strongest in a millennia as climate change shifts weather patterns, leaving Antarctica colder and Australia facing more droughts, a study showed Monday.

Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were strengthening the winds, already dubbed the "Roaring Forties" for their ferocity, and pushing them further south towards Antarctica, researchers from the Australian National University (ANU) said.

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Scientists Still Working to ID Victims from 9/11

Thousands of vacuum-sealed plastic pouches filled with bits of bone rest in a Manhattan laboratory. These are the last unidentified fragments of the people who died in the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

On Saturday, the 7,930 pouches are to be moved in a solemn procession from the city medical examiner's office to the new trade center site. They will be kept in a bedrock repository 70 feet underground in the new Sept. 11 Memorial Museum that opens May 21.

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Cambodia Seizes Three Tonnes of Ivory in Record Haul

Cambodian customs officials are pictured with a haul of seized ivory at a port of Sihanoukville on May 9, 2014

Cambodian customs on Friday seized more than three tonnes of ivory -- the country's largest-ever haul of elephant tusks -- hidden in a container of beans.

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New Frog Species Found in Troubled Indian Habitat

Scientists have discovered 14 new species of so-called dancing frogs in the jungle mountains of southern India — just in time, they fear, to watch them fade away.

Indian biologists say they found the tiny acrobatic amphibians, which earned their name with the unusual kicks they use to attract mates, declining dramatically in number during the 12 years in which they chronicled the species through morphological descriptions and molecular DNA markers. They breed after the yearly monsoon in fast-rushing streams, but their habitat appears to be becoming increasingly dry.

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Space Station Loses Power Channel, Backup Working

The International Space Station is down one power channel because of an electrical malfunction. But NASA says everyone and everything is safe up there.

Mission Control says one of eight power channels went down Thursday because of an apparent trip in an electrical switch. Most of the station systems that depend on that power line immediately switched to a backup. Within an hour, flight controllers moved the remaining systems to the backup power channel.

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Antarctic Treaty Signatories Make Marine Protection Progress

Antarctic Treaty signatories made progress Wednesday towards future protection of the icy continent's marine life, NGO officials said.

Authorities at the treaty's annual meeting, in Brasilia this year, "sent a strong message of support" to the commission overseeing Antarctic wildlife protection, said Mark Epstein, director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. 

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Study: Radio Waves Affect Migrating Birds

Radio waves disrupt the magnetic "compass" in robins, according to a study published on Wednesday that is likely to fuel debate about the safety of electronic devices.

In a long and careful experiment, German scientists found that migrating robins became disorientated when exposed to electromagnetic fields at levels far lower than the safety threshold for humans.

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Scientists Add New Letters to Alphabet of Life

Scientists, in a world first, announced Wednesday they had added two letters to the genetic code that forms the chemical blueprint for life.

They said they had modified a bacterium so that it incorporated and replicated two DNA ingredients that are not found in nature.

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Polar Scientists Drill 2,000-Year-Old Ice Core

Polar scientists said Thursday they had successfully drilled a 2,000-year-old ice core in the heart of Antarctica in a bid to retrieve a frozen record of how the planet's climate has evolved.

The Aurora Basin North project involves scientists from Australia, China, France, Denmark, Germany and the United States who hope it will also advance the search for the scientific "holy grail" of the million-year-old ice core.

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Germany Now EU's Worst Polluter as CO2 Emissions Rise

Germany is the European Union's worst polluter, with its production of CO2 gasses from fossil fuel rising by two percent in 2013 to 760 million tonnes, official data showed on Wednesday.

The EU's statistics agency Eurostat found that while emissions were cut across the 28-member bloc by an average of 2.5 percent in 2013, they actually went up in six countries, including Germany.

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