Just a seventh of scientists in Japan are female, government figures show -- the lowest rate of any developed nation, despite being a record high for the country.

The survey comes amid a high-profile row in Japan that has pitted a young female researcher against the scientific establishment, and after repeated calls for Tokyo to boost female participation in the workforce to help plug a skills gap in the economy.

Japan on Monday insisted it had made no decision on whether to resume whaling in the Southern Ocean next year, after a militant environmental group said Tokyo intended to evade an international court ruling.

Tokyo this month said it was "deeply disappointed" that the UN's top court declared the annual Antarctic whaling hunt was a commercial activity disguised as science, but was calling the 2014-15 hunt off.

Cold and dry today, Mars was previously warm and wet but possibly only at intervals, a study published on Sunday suggests.

Scientists have long puzzled over what happened to the water, the precious stuff of life, on the Red Planet.

The launch of a SpaceX rocket and its Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station will go ahead as scheduled Monday despite a glitch affecting a computer on the station, officials said.

The Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned capsule Dragon is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 4:58pm (2058 GMT), SpaceX vice president Hans Koenigsmann said.

Fish are losing their survival instinct -- even becoming attracted to the smell of their predators -- as the world's oceans become more acidic because of climate change, new research said Monday.

The study of fish in coral reefs off the coast of Papua New Guinea -- where the waters are naturally acidic -- showed the animals' behavior became riskier.

A computer outage at the International Space Station may require a spacewalk by astronauts and threatens to delay next week's launch of a commercial supply ship for NASA.

NASA said Friday night that a backup computer on the outside of the orbiting lab is not responding to commands.

After racing against the clock in an all-night session, the U.N.'s expert panel on climate change was putting the final touches Saturday on a scientific guide to help governments, industries and regular people take action to stop global warming from reaching dangerous levels.

As always when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change adopts one of its high-profile reports, the week-long talks in Berlin were slowed by wrangling between scientists and governments over which words, charts and tables to use in the roughly 30-page summary of a much bigger scientific report.

The IMF and World Bank on Friday urged finance ministers to impose a price on carbon, warning that time was running out for the planet to avoid worst-case climate change.

The heads of the two global economic institutions convened ministers from 46 countries -- including the United States, China, India and European powers -- on the sidelines of spring meetings in Washington to press the case for urgent climate action.

A tropical cyclone battered Australia's Barrier Reef coast Saturday, knocking out power and phone lines for thousands of people as officials warned the storm "continues to be a threat" despite weakening in force.

Tens of thousands of people hunkered down overnight as strong gales and heavy rains lashed the far north but no deaths or major destruction was reported as cyclone Ita was downgraded to a category one storm.

It's Plan B in the fight against climate change: cooling the planet by sucking heat-trapping CO2 from the air or reflecting sunlight back into space.

Called geoengineering, it's considered mad science by opponents. Supporters say it would be foolish to ignore it, since plan A — slashing carbon emissions from fossil fuels — is moving so slowly.