Scientists on Sunday sparked a fresh debate over what triggered Indonesia's Lusi mud volcano, still spewing truckloads of slime more than seven years after it leapt catastrophically into life.

Published in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study strengthens the argument by gas company PT Lapindo Brantas that the disaster was caused by a distant earthquake, not by its drilling crew as some experts contend.

Within 50 years, climate change will probably wipe out the world's most endangered feline, the Iberian lynx, even if the world meets its target for curbing carbon emissions, biologists said on Sunday.

The gloomy forecast, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, says that without a dramatic shift in conservative strategy, the charismatic little wildcat seems doomed.

Smile Earth! You're on camera.

NASA is inviting the public to look skyward and wave at Saturn and Mercury in what is billed as an interplanetary photo op.

After a quarter-century of searching, scientists have nailed down how one particularly rare subatomic particle decays into something else — a discovery that adds certainty to our thinking about how the universe began and keeps running.

The world's top particle physics lab said Friday it had measured the decay time of a particle known as a Bs (B sub s) meson into two other fundamental particles called muons, which are much heavier than but similar to electrons. It was observed as part of the reams of data coming from CERN's $10 billion Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest atom smasher, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.

A landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, shows no evidence that chemicals from the natural gas drilling process moved up to contaminate drinking water aquifers at a western Pennsylvania drilling site, the Department of Energy told The Associated Press.

After a year of monitoring, the researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas trapped deep below the surface stayed thousands of feet (1,000 feet equals 300 meters) below the shallower areas that supply drinking water, geologist Richard Hammack said.

Japan's government on Friday gave its seal of approval to the world's first clinical trials using stem cells harvested from a patient's own body.

Health Minister Norihisa Tamura signed off on a proposal by two research institutes that will allow them to begin tests aimed at treating age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a common medical condition that causes blindness in older people, using "induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells".

Warfare was uncommon among hunter-gatherers, and killings among nomadic groups were often due to competition for women or interpersonal disputes, researchers in Finland said Thursday.

Their study in the U.S. journal Science suggests that the origins of war were not -- as some have argued -- rooted in roving hunter-gather groups but rather in cultures that held land and livestock and knew how to farm for food.

Two NASA spacecraft are about to take pictures of the Earth for planetary science research, and the U.S. space agency is encouraging people worldwide to jump into the shot.

"Consider it the first interplanetary photobomb," NASA said.

Deforestation has soared in the Brazilian Amazon since a new forestry code was passed last year at the urging of the agribusiness lobby, a non-profit environmental group said Thursday.

Between August 2012 and June 2013, 1,838 square kilometers (709 square miles) of forest were lost, a 103 percent hike over the same previous period, Institute Imazon said in its latest report.

Gene scientists on Wednesday said that in lab-dish cells, they had found a way to switch off the rogue chromosome that causes Down's syndrome.

The breakthrough opens up the tantalising goal of therapy for Down's, they said, cautioning that years of work lie ahead before this aim is reached -- if, in fact, it is attainable.