A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would set off a global famine that could kill two billion people and effectively end human civilization, a study said Tuesday.

Even if limited in scope, a conflict with nuclear weapons would wreak havoc in the atmosphere and devastate crop yields, with the effects multiplied as global food markets went into turmoil, the report said.

A U.S. space agency rover tooling around on the surface of Mars has found remnants of an ancient freshwater lake that may have supported tiny life forms, scientists said Monday.

There is no water left in it, but drill tests and a chemical analysis of its fine-grained rocks by the Curiosity robot's science instruments suggest microbial life could have thrived there billions of years ago.

Canada signaled intentions to claim the North Pole and surrounding Arctic waters while announcing Monday the filing of a U.N. application seeking to vastly expand its Atlantic sea boundary.

After a decade of surveying the country's eastern and far north seabeds and gathering supporting evidence, a claim was submitted to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf on Friday.

After the Boston marathon bombings, people who spent six hours a day scouring media for updates were more traumatized than those who were actually there, a U.S. study suggested Monday.

The study raised questions about the psychological impact of repeated exposure to violence via digital and traditional media in the first major terror attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.

Scientists from Saudi Arabia and China said on Sunday they have completed mapping the genome of the date-palm tree, whose fruit is a staple food in many regions.

Scientists from Riyadh's King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology and China's Shenzhen-based BGI have been working on the project since 2008.

Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians are on Monday to sign a joint water-sharing initiative, but an environmental group denied it was connected to the controversial Red Sea, Dead Sea plan.

According to Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), the agreement, which will be signed at the World Bank's headquarters in Washington, will see Jordan providing 50 million cubic liters of desalinated water to Israel's Red Sea resort of Eilat.

China's first lunar rover entered the moon's orbit on Friday, state media reported, a key step towards the vessel's planned landing later this month.

The rover -- known as Yutu, or Jade Rabbit -- reached lunar orbit late Friday, the official Xinhua news agency said, about 112 hours after it was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern China.

Two Japanese whaling ships and a surveillance vessel left Saturday for the annual hunt in the Antarctic Sea, Kyodo News said.

The three ships departed from the western port of Shimonoseki to join other ships to hunt up to 935 Antarctic minke whales and up to 50 fin whales through March, the news agency said.

One of this year's Nobel Prize laureates says learning how to handle failure is key to becoming a successful scientist.

American James Rothman, who shared the medicine prize with countryman Randy Schekman and German-American Thomas Sudhof, said Friday that doing scientific research almost always means not getting the desired result.

China's commercial hub Shanghai was blanketed by dense smog Friday, delaying flights and spurring sales of face masks.

Levels of PM 2.5 -- tiny particles in the air considered particularly hazardous to health -- rose to more than 600 micrograms per cubic meter in the afternoon, Shanghai's government said on its microblog.