A plant thief has stolen one of the few surviving examples of the world's smallest water lily, which is extinct in the wild, from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, police said.

The tiny 'Nymphaea Thermarum' was stolen on Thursday from the Princess of Wales Conservatory, a giant glass house at the gardens in the southwest of the capital, a Scotland Yard statement said.

Energy-related carbon dioxide pollution grew by 2 percent last year after declining several years in a row, a government report said Monday. The increase was largely due to a small boost in coal consumption by the electric power industry, according to the study by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

American cars and factories spewed 5.38 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2013, up from 5.27 billion in 2012, the report said. Carbon dioxide is the chief man-made global warming gas.

Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, one of the biggest single contributors to world sea-level rise, is melting irreversibly and could add as much as a centimeter (0.4 inches) to ocean levels in 20 years, a study said Sunday.

The glacier "has started a phase of self-sustained retreat and will irreversibly continue its decline," said Gael Durand, a glaciologist with France's Grenoble Alps University.

Bulging in land that occurs before a volcano erupts points to how much ash will be spewed into the sky, providing a useful early warning for aviation, geologists in Iceland said on Sunday.

The telltale came from data from Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors placed around the notorious Icelandic volcano Grimsvoetn, they said.

Authorities in Uruguay on Sunday recovered the body of a 16-meter sperm whale, normally at home in deep waters, after it beached near the capital.

Using a crane, the authorities moved the animal from the shallow waters onto the beach off Carrasco, an upscale town just next to Montevideo.

The United States is facing an epidemic of herbicide-resistant "superweeds" that some activists and researchers are blaming on GMOs, an accusation rejected by industry giants.

According to a recent study, the situation is such that American farmers are "heading for a crisis."

The elephant population in Tanzania, beset by poaching for ivory, has plummeted by two-thirds in the past three-and-a-half decades, the government said on Saturday.

The findings are the result of a census carried out at the end of last year in the country's parks and reserves with the largest elephant herds, Lazaro Nyalandu, junior minister for natural resources and tourism, said in a statement.

European nations stand sharply divided over setting new 2030 targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming, EU sources said Friday.

European Commission head Jose Manuel Barroso called in commissioners to try to agree figures ahead of talks on January 22 but there was no progress, one source said.

French fashion is getting smarter with the help of fabric woven with micro-sensors that can reveal when someone is weary or unwell.

France-based Cityzen Sciences was at the Consumer Electronics Show on Friday with shirts made of "Smart Sensing" material that reads body heat, heart rate, motion and location.

Canada's closure of science libraries containing a vast repository of environmental data dating back more than a century has researchers worried that valuable books and reference materials are being lost in the name of cost-cutting.

Unique in its shore access to three oceans (Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific) and with the largest number of freshwater lakes in the world, Canada over the years has amassed a huge cache of books and scientific reports on fisheries, meteorology and wildlife -- on everything from beluga whales to songbirds.