The Red Cross has launched a light-hearted education campaign aimed at those it describes as most vulnerable to climate change: Pacific islanders living on low-lying atolls threatened by rising seas.

Red Cross disaster management specialist Tom Bamforth said the Pacific's complex weather patterns were well understood by scientists, but the knowledge was not filtering down to local decision-makers.

A new method could double the lead time for forecasting the ocean warming trend known as El Nino and help communities better prepare for crops losses, floods and drought, German researchers said Monday.

The forecasting algorithm is based on the interactions between sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific and the rest of the ocean, and appears to warn of an El Nino event one year in advance instead of the current six months.

Wildlife crime investigators hope to crack down on illegal elephant killing with a new tool for analyzing ivory that uses nuclear test residue to determine the age of a tusk, said a study out Monday.

Tens of thousands of elephants are hunted for their ivory each year. As few as 470,000 African elephants remain, making them a vulnerable species while the Asian elephant is endangered and may number about 30,000, experts say.

Two billion years from now, an ever-hotter Sun will have cooked the Earth, leaving microbes confined to pockets of water in mountains or caves as the last survivors, a study said Monday.

The bleak scenario is proposed by astrobiologist Jack O'Malley-James of the University of St. Andrews, Edinburgh.

A freshwater shrimp, an island-dwelling lizard and a pupfish from Arizona have been declared extinct, while nearly 21,000 species are at risk of dying out, an updated "Red List" released on Tuesday showed.

"The overall picture is alarming," said Jane Smart of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is behind the Red List of Threatened Species that to date has assessed 70,294 of the world's 1.82 million known species of plants and animals.

A year since the discovery of a subatomic particle set the science world aflutter, evidence is mounting it may be the elusive Higgs boson even as researchers warn the suspense is far from over.

"We have established without a doubt that we have a new particle, and that it is a boson. What remains to be done is confirm that it is a Higgs," said physicist Pauline Gagnon, a member of the team that made the discovery at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN).

It's a weird, lopsided fight if ever there was one: seagulls divebombing to attack and feed on the fat of 50-ton whales and their babies. And the birds are winning.

The battle, new in recent years, is playing out in the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina's Patagonia region, and is not known to be happening in waters elsewhere in the world that are home to the mighty mammals.

U.S. President Barack Obama touted his new climate change proposal in his weekly address Saturday, calling for Americans to lead the charge against the warming environment.

"Those who already feel the effects of a changing climate don't have time to deny it -- they're busy dealing with it," said Obama in his pre-recorded address on radio and the Internet.

India will Monday launch the first stage of its domestic satellite navigation network which will eventually provide services both to civilians and the military and is similar to the U.S. Global Positioning System, officials said.

The first of seven satellites will be carried into space as part of the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), just months after China inaugurated its own domestic satellite navigation system.

Marine scientists have called on New Zealand to immediately ban fishing in waters inhabited by the world's rarest dolphin, saying that losing just one more of the creatures will threaten the species' existence.

The Maui's dolphin is one of the world's smallest, with a maximum length of 1.7 meters (5.5 feet), prompting conservationists to call it "the hobbit of the sea".