The Marshall Islands symbolically disposed of confiscated shark fins at sea Tuesday in a ceremony witnessed by regional leaders attending the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF).

The gesture underscored the progress made towards protecting the marine predators since the Marshalls declared a two million square kilometre (770,000 square mile) shark sanctuary in 2011, Angelo Villagomez from the U.S.-based Pew Charitable Trusts said.

Hundreds of thousands of dead fish were left floating in a Chinese river after a chemical discharge, officials said Wednesday, the latest industrial accident to pollute the country's battered environment.

About 100,000 kilograms of fish were cleared from 40 kilometres of the Fu river in Wuhan, the capital of the central province of Hubei, the official Xinhua news agency said, citing "local government investigations".

A large asteroid has been named after Alejandro Jodorowsky, the cult Franco-Chilean film-maker and science-fiction comics writer who later became a spiritual guru.

The Minor Planets Center, a branch of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), has listed asteroid 261690 Jodorowsky at the request of a French astronomer who spotted the five-kilometer (three-mile) -wide object more than seven years ago.

Humanity has pushed the world's climate system to the brink, leaving itself only scant time to act, the head of the U.N.'s group of climate scientists said on Monday.

"We have five minutes before midnight," warned Rajendra Pachauri, whose organisation will this month release the first volume of a new assessment of global warming and its impacts.

A new kind of skin-eating fungus has been killing fire salamanders in the Netherlands at an alarming rate, European researchers said Monday.

The boldly colored yellow and black salamanders have dwindled rapidly since 2010, with just four percent of their original population left.

A 350-million-year-old fossilised scorpion discovered in South Africa is the oldest known land animal to have lived on Gondwana, part of Earth's former supercontinent, a university said Monday.

The new species, named Gondwanascorpio emzantsiensis, provides tantalising clues about the development of life before Earth's continents broke apart to form the globe that is familiar to us today, scientists said.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday the evidence for climate change was beyond dispute but it was not too late for international action to prevent its worst impacts.

"The science is clear. It is irrefutable and it is alarming," Kerry told a climate conference in Majuro in the Marshall Islands in a video address from Washington.

Crop-damaging insects, bacteria, fungus and viruses are moving poleward by nearly three kilometers (two miles) each year, helped by global warming, a study said on Sunday.

A team at Britain's University of Exeter trawled through two huge databases to chart the latitude and dates for the earliest record of 612 crop pests.

The average height of European men rose by 11 centimeters (4.4 inches) between 1870 and 1980, an unprecedented spurt linked mainly to better health, a study published on Monday says.

The estimate is garnered from military, medical and other records from 15 countries for young adult males aged around 21.

A rocket carrying an Israeli communications satellite has been successfully launched from a Russian facility in Kazakhstan, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) said in a statement on Sunday.

It said that the AMOS-4 satellite lifted off from the Baikonur cosmodrome atop a Russian Zenit rocket on Saturday night.