U.S. environmental authorities made a rare move Friday to block a massive copper and gold mine in Alaska before it even gets under way, in a bid to protect wild salmon.

The Pebble Mine project has the potential to be one of the biggest open pit copper mines, but once built, it could threaten the exceptionally rich salmon fishery in the Bristol Bay area, the Environmental Protection Agency explained in a statement.

Malaysia said Friday it will expand water rationing in and around its capital, in a move affecting millions as drought continues to scorch a tropical country usually synonymous with torrential rain.

The national water commission said in a statement over 300,000 households in Kuala Lumpur and nearby Selangor, Malaysia's most populous state, will experience cuts for the whole of March, after a two-month dry spell depleted reservoirs.

Global warming will reduce the world's crop production by up to two percent every decade and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of this century, according to a draft U.N. report, Japanese media said Friday.

The document is the second volume in a long-awaited trilogy by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Nobel-winning group of scientists, which is set to be issued next month after a five-day meeting in Japan, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported.

NASA on Wednesday announced a torrent of new planet discoveries, hailing a "bonanza" of 715 worlds now known outside the solar system thanks to the Kepler space telescope's planet-hunting mission.

A new method for verifying potential planets led to the volume of new discoveries from Kepler, which aims to help humans search for other worlds that may be like Earth.

U.S. and British scientific academies said Wednesday there was a clear consensus that climate change is real and will have serious disruptive effects on the planet.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Britain's Royal Society said they were making the joint declaration in hopes of moving the public debate forward -- to the question of how the world responds, instead of whether climate change is happening.

Japan will launch its latest rocket early Friday morning, carrying a hi-tech satellite to monitor global rainfall and help meteorologists forecast big storms.

The H-IIA rocket will blast off from a southern Japanese island at 3:37 am on Friday, (1837 GMT Thursday) with the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) core observatory aboard, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said.

Scientists investigating a graveyard of marine mammal fossils near Chile's northern coast say toxins generated by algae blooms most likely poisoned the animals millions of years ago.

The study by a team of Chilean and Smithsonian Institution scientists was published Wednesday in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Militant environmental group Sea Shepherd on Wednesday said it is seeking a Supreme Court injunction to halt a controversial shark culling policy in Western Australia.

The group, best known for battling Japanese whalers in the Antarctic, has teamed up with Sharon Burden, the mother of a shark attack victim, to apply for a judicial review of the decision, claiming it involves the unlawful killing of a protected species.

China's biggest online face-mask sellers were running out of stock Wednesday as consumers rushed to protect themselves from smog that has shrouded large swathes of northern China for an entire week.

Beijing's official reading for PM 2.5 -- small airborne particles which easily penetrate the lungs and have been linked to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths -- stood at 501 micro grams per cubic metre on Wednesday afternoon. The World Health Organisation's recommended safe limit is 25.

Chateau Paradise or Chateau Rotgut?

Why is it that one wine can be exquisitely smooth, and another stomach-turningly tart?