A scientific study out Thursday identifies 78 sites worldwide in dire need of environmental protection because they harbor species that could go extinct.

Many of the locations are already in protected areas of 34 countries. Together they contain populations of birds, amphibians, and mammals that are globally threatened.

Hundreds of slow lorises have been seized on Indonesia's Java island as animal smugglers were about to send the protected primates to markets to be sold as pets, officials said Friday.

Government officials last week discovered 238 of the nocturnal animals, one of the few mammals that has a toxic bite, packed into small plastic crates at the port of Merak in the north-west of Java.

Japan said Friday it was dramatically scaling back its greenhouse gas emissions target after the Fukushima nuclear accident forced the country to turn to fossil-fuel burning energy sources, a move denounced by climate campaigners.

Tokyo said the new target for 2020 -- 3.8 percent below 2005 levels -- replaces an ambitious goal to slash emissions by one-quarter from 1990 levels, which had been hailed by environmentalists.

Deforestation in Brazil's Amazon region rose 28 percent over the past year, Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said Thursday, announcing she was calling an emergency meeting to try to remedy the situation.

"We confirm a 28-percent increase in the rate of deforestation, reaching 5,843 square kilometers (2256 square miles)," Teixeira told a press conference, citing provisional statistics for August 2012 through July this year.

The powers of poison will be on full display in New York's Museum of Natural History starting Saturday, when a new exhibit opens.

The display "reveals the strange and even intriguing things that happen when humans and toxic substances collide," said museum director Ellen Futter.

"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.