Europe's physics lab CERN said Thursday it was eyeing plans for a circular particle collider that would be seven times more powerful than the facility which discovered the famous "God particle."

"The time has come to look even further ahead," the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced.

The United States said Thursday that Iceland was violating an international agreement through its whaling, opening the possibility of economic sanctions over the controversial hunt.

The Department of the Interior, in a decision it is required to take under U.S. law, found that the Nordic country's actions violated the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

Arturo has been in mourning since the death of his companion in 2012. It is summer now in Argentina, and he is exhausted from the heat. A trip to cool Canada might brighten his mood.

Such is life for an aging, depressed polar bear at a zoo in Mendoza, at the foot of the Andes in western Argentina.

The next cargo supply mission to the International Space Station by the U.S. company SpaceX has been set for March 16, NASA said Wednesday.

SpaceX's unmanned Dragon capsule will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 4:41 am (0941 GMT) on its third trip ferrying supplies and equipment to the orbiting lab, the U.S. space agency said in a tweet.

The two years of drought in the central United States is placing strains on the water-intense oil and gas fracking industry, according to a new study Wednesday.

Nearly 50 percent of the wells drilled since 2011 using hydraulic fracturing, aimed at exploiting hard-to-tap oil and gas deposits, are in areas with "high or extremely high water stress," according to the study by Ceres, a non-profit group promoting sustainability in business.

Scientists were on Thursday working to classify a new species of giant jellyfish that washed up on an Australian beach, describing it as a "whopper" that took their breath away.

The 1.5-metre (4 foot 11 inch) specimen was found by a family in the southern state of Tasmania, who contacted a local marine biologist.

Last year tied for the sixth hottest on record, confirming that Earth's climate system is in the grip of warming that will affect generations to come, the U.N.'s weather agency said Wednesday.

"The global temperature for the year 2013 is consistent with the long-term warming trend," World Meteorological Organization (WMO) chief Michel Jarraud said in a statement.

A treasure trove of fossilized dinosaurs and other long-extinct species in northeastern China was created, Pompeii-style, by an erupting volcano, scientists said Tuesday.

A seam of rock known as the Yixian and Jiufotang formations, in western Liaoning province, is the burial ground of an astonishing array of creatures that lived around 120 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous.

Scientists on Tuesday said they could fill a blank in the history of Central Africa's pygmies, whose past is one of the most elusive of any community in the world.

At a key period in the human odyssey, these hunter-gatherer tribes shunned interbreeding with Bantu-speaking communities who were early farmers, according to a gene analysis.

Women rate top male endurance cyclists more attractive than lower-ranked ones even without knowing who they are, a finding that sheds light on the mating game, a scientist said Wednesday.

Evolutionary biologist Erik Postma of the University of Zurich selected portraits of 80 cyclists who took part in the 2012 Tour de France, one of the most grueling events in sport, and asked participants in an online survey to rate the faces for attractiveness.