Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority on Friday approved the dumping of up to three million cubic meters of dredge waste in park waters in a move blasted by environmentalists.

The decision follows the government giving the green light to a major coal port expansion for India's Adani Group on the reef coast in December, under some of the strictest-ever environmental conditions.

A controversial French biologist, whose 2012 paper on the alleged dangers of pesticides was withdrawn, has published new claims that the chemicals were many times more toxic than advertised.

Gilles-Eric Seralini's earlier work found that rats exposed to genetically modified maize and the pesticide Roundup developed tumors and other health problems, but his findings were questioned and his paper in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology finally retracted after his study methods were found lacking.

The stunning and little-understood annual migration of millions of Monarch butterflies to spend the winter in Mexico is in danger of disappearing, experts said Wednesday, after numbers dropped to their lowest level since record-keeping began in 1993.

Their report blamed the displacement of the milkweed the species feeds on by genetically modified crops and urban sprawl in the United States, extreme weather trends and the dramatic reduction of the butterflies' habitat in Mexico due to illegal logging of the trees they depend on for shelter.

The 1-3 percent of the Neanderthal genome that survives in modern humans likely helped early homo sapiens adapt to cold Europe by conferring a thicker skin, researchers said Wednesday.

It may also have transferred a genetically higher risk for diabetes and lupus.

Europe's bat population recovered by more than 40 percent between 1993 and 2011 after decades of decline, according to a survey published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) on Thursday.

In their most comprehensive study yet, surveyors fanned out across nine countries to count numbers at 6,000 sites used for hibernation by 16 of Europe's 45 bat species.

Climate change means more extreme weather and baby penguins are paying the price with their lives, said a pair of long-term studies out Wednesday.

Soaking rainstorms and unusual heat have killed vast numbers of young Magellanic penguins at the bottom tip of South America, said one of the papers published in the journal PLOS ONE.

Engineers intrigued by the toughness of mollusc shells, which are composed of brittle minerals, have found inspiration in their structure to make glass 200 times stronger than a standard pane.

Counter-intuitively, the glass is strengthened by introducing a network of microscopic cracks, according to a study published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.

It turns out there is a Guinness record for the place with the most lightning, and an area of Venezuela with 20,000 flashes of it per hour has won.

The certification was handed over Tuesday by Guinness Book of World Records representative Johanna Hessling.

The jaguar could soon become extinct in Brazil's tropical Atlantic forest, threatening the shrinking primitive forest itself, Brazilian scientists warned Monday.

A study by the Brazilian conservation authority Cenap indicated the adult jaguar population in the region may have fallen to just 250, "an 80 percent slide over the past 15 years."

A court in Kenya on Tuesday slapped a record sentence on a Chinese ivory smuggler, the first person to be convicted under tough new laws designed to stem a surge in poaching.

Tang Yong Jian, 40, was ordered to pay 20 million shillings (170,500 euros, 233,000 dollars) or else go to jail for seven years.