U.S. researchers have been working on a system to measure and predict the destructiveness of wildfires — similar to the way officials use the magnitude scale for earthquakes and other tools to rate and evaluate tornadoes and hurricanes.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology hopes its Wildland Urban Interface Hazard Scale will tell residents the likely intensity of a wildfire burning into their neighborhood.

A slowdown in warming that has provided fuel for climate skeptics is one of the thorniest issues in a report to be issued by U.N. experts on Friday.

Over the past 15 years, the world's average surface temperature rose far slower than many climate models have predicted.

A new commercial spaceship will wait all week before aiming again for the International Space Station.

Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus capsule was supposed to arrive Sunday, four days after its launch. But the rendezvous was aborted because of a discrepancy in navigation data between the two vessels.

Russian border guards were on Monday towing a ship of the environmental lobby group Greenpeace to an Arctic port where its activists could face charges for a protest on an oil rig owned by the Gazprom energy giant.

The Arctic Sunrise ship, which Russian security forces have controlled since storming the vessel in a dramatic helicopter operation on Thursday, is to arrive in the Russian Far Northern port of Murmansk on Tuesday, the group and officials said.

The U.N.'s climate panel warned on Monday that evidence was mounting each year of changes to Earth's weather system as it began talks on a new global warming report.

The world's paramount authority on the greenhouse effect, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will on Friday release the first volume of a comprehensive report on climate change, its impacts and ways to cope with the challenge.

It was back to the drawing board for Australian scientists Monday after another breeding season for giant pandas failed to produce results at the Adelaide Zoo.

Wang Wang and Funi arrived in Australia on a decade-long loan from China in late 2009 and there were hopes of breeding the Southern Hemisphere's first baby pandas.

A brand new commercial cargo ship making its orbital debut experienced navigation system trouble Sunday, and its arrival at the International Space Station was delayed at least two days.

The rendezvous was aborted less than six hours before the scheduled arrival of Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus capsule, packed with 1,300 pounds of food and clothes for the space station crew.

Several thousand Bucharest residents got on their bikes Saturday, criss-crossing the streets of the Romanian capital in a protest to demand the creation of bicycle lanes in the congested city.

"I have a car but I prefer to ride my bike," said a protester who gave his name only as Alexandru. "But sometimes that is very dangerous because there are no bicycle lanes. If there were, the city would be less built up, less polluted and more civilized."

A Japanese town abandoned after the Fukushima nuclear accident has protested Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's global promise that the situation of the crippled plant was "under control", papers reported Saturday.

The town assembly of Namie, half of which sits within the 20-kilometer (12-mile) zone around the nuclear plant, unanimously adopted a statement of protest against Abe's remarks on Friday, saying his comments went against facts on the ground, the Asahi and the Mainichi papers said.

The upcoming U.N. report on climate change is not likely to rattle U.S. deniers of global warming who hold sway in the halls of power, experts say.

A hefty analysis of the latest science on global climate change, the report is packed with recommendations for policymakers.