Aerospace giant Boeing and its research partners in the Middle East said Wednesday they would start field trials after recording progress in making biofuel from desert plants fed with seawater.

The Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium, affiliated with the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, will plant two hectares (five hectares) of the saltwater-tolerant plants called halophytes in the region's sandy soil and the plants will be fed with waste water from a fish and shrimp farm.

Japanese researchers said Thursday they had succeeded in using cosmic rays to find nuclear fuel inside a reactor, a technology that might be helpful in the complicated decommissioning at Fukushima.

By observing the way the particles behaved near reactors, container vessels and spent fuel pools, they were able to obtain a clear visual picture of the fuel, they said.

Northern Kenya is at risk of drought if current weather trends continue, the Red Cross warned Wednesday of the harsh areas awash with guns where people depend on animals for their livelihoods.

"The short rains lasting October, November and December failed, and we have not had rain so far in January," Red Cross Secretary-General Abbas Gullet told Agence France Presse, noting rains are not now expected until April.

EU member states should cut their carbon dioxide emissions, widely blamed for global warming, by 40 percent by 2030, the European Commission said Wednesday.

Member states should also ensure that renewables count for 27 percent of their energy mix by the same date, it said, unveiling its 2030 climate change package.

Imagine a creature so slothful that it snacks off its own fur and budges only once a week for a bowel movement.

Well, there is one, say scientists, and it is a type of sloth.

Surging air pollution from China and other fast-growing Asian economies has intensified winter cyclones in the northwest Pacific, scientists said Tuesday.

Winter cyclones in latitudes including northwestern China, Korea and Japan have packed stronger winds and more rain as a result of rising levels of particulate pollution, they said.

Scientists whose Antarctic expedition became trapped in sea ice finally returned to dry land Wednesday, apologizing for the disruption and facing questions over who will pay for the international rescue mission.

The scientists were among the 52 passengers plucked by helicopter from their stranded Russian ship, the Akademik Shokalskiy, on January 2 after Chinese and Australian icebreakers failed to cut through the ice to rescue them.

The US ambassador to Japan should visit Taiji to see the "humane" killing methods used in the dolphin hunt, a local fisheries official said Tuesday, days after Caroline Kennedy tweeted her disapproval of the slaughter.

His comments came as campaigners watching the hunt said the butchery was under way, adding that the waters of the cove were red with the dolphins' blood.

Waking up after almost three years of hibernation, a comet-chasing spacecraft sent its first signal back to Earth on Monday, prompting cheers from scientists who hope to use it to land the first space lander onto a comet.

The European Space Agency received the all-clear message from its Rosetta spacecraft at 7:18 p.m. (1818 GMT; 1:18 p.m. EST) — a message that had to travel some 800 million kilometers (500 million miles).

Astronomers said Sunday they had for the first time seen the gas strands theorized to hold the universe together in a "cosmic web".

They had used the intense radiation generated by a quasar -- a byproduct of a supermassive black hole -- acting as a type of cosmic flashlight to illuminate part of the vast filament network.