"Little Red Riding Hood" may have been heading to her grandmother's house -- but anthropologists wanted to know where she came from and just how her story spread.

By applying a mathematical model more commonly used by biologists to study the evolution of species, the researchers were able to create a sort of "evolutionary tree" for the popular folk tale, according to a new study out Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday offered a $1 million reward to help smash a Laos-based poaching network slaughtering endangered elephants and rhinos for their precious horns and tusks.

The reward, the first of its kind by the State Department, targeted the Xaysavang network which operates from Laos as far afield as South Africa, Mozambique, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and China.

Global warming is set to heat up with temperatures rising to nearly twice targets set by the United Nations, the International Energy Agency warned on Tuesday.

This is despite pushes towards energy efficiency and a raft of international pledges to curb global warming, the IEA said.

Penguins waddled into the book of life around 20 million years ago and diversified thanks to global cooling which opened up Antarctica for habitation, a study said on Wednesday.

Scientists led by Sankar Subramanian of Griffith University in Australia sequenced telltale signatures of DNA from the genome of 11 penguin species that are alive today.

The first test mission of a new deep space capsule that could one day take humans to Mars is on track for September 2014, the U.S. space agency said Tuesday.

Orion aims to replace U.S. capacity to reach space -- which ended with the retirement of the space shuttle program closed in 2011 after 30 years -- and ferry astronauts farther in the solar system than ever before.

An ancient skull found in Tibet indicates that big cats originated in central Asia, and not Africa as widely thought, palaeontologists reported on Wednesday.

Dated at between 4.1 and 5.95 million years old, the fossil is the oldest remains ever found of a pantherine felid, as big cats are called.

Nations launched a new round of talks Monday for a 2015 deal to cut Earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions, in the aftermath of a devastating Philippines typhoon the U.N.'s climate chief labelled "sobering".

Christiana Figueres urged progress at the notoriously fractious talks amid a slew of new warnings of potentially disastrous global warming as a Filipino negotiator made a tearful undertaking to fast until the talks yield a tangible result.

A leading environmental group on Monday called on authorities to keep tough fishing quotas on Atlantic tuna when governments meet next week to set industry rules.

The U.S.-based Pew Charitable Trusts called on the 47-member governments of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas to maintain catch limits on endangered bluefin tuna.

India's Mars spacecraft was "successfully" raised into a higher orbit around Earth early on Tuesday, after a brief engine failure during an earlier attempt, the space agency said.

The Mars Orbiter Mission, which blasted off on November 5 for a 11-month trip to the Red Planet, is being launched on its way via an unusual "slingshot" method for interplanetary journeys.

Russia successfully launched a Proton-M rocket carrying a military satellite in the early hours of Tuesday from its Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

The launch took place at 03:46 Moscow time (23:46 GMT) carrying a satellite for the Russian defense ministry, the Russian space agency Roscosmos said.