Jason-1, a satellite that for more than a decade precisely tracked rising sea levels across a vast sweep of ocean and helped forecasters make better weather and climate predictions, has ended its useful life after circling the globe more than 53,500 times, NASA announced Wednesday.

The joint U.S. and French satellite was decommissioned this week after its last remaining transmitter failed, according to a NASA statement.

A revolutionary solar-powered plane is about to end a slow, symbolic journey across America by quietly buzzing the Statue of Liberty and landing in a city whose buildings often obscure the sun.

The Solar Impulse leaves from Washington on a journey planned for Saturday, depending on the weather. It will take hours for the journey — top speed is 45 mph (73 kph) — and there are none of the most basic comforts of flying.

President Barack Obama's push to fight global warming has triggered condemnation from the U.S. coal industry across the industrial Midwest, where state and local economies depend on the health of an energy sector facing strict new pollution limits.

But such concerns stretch even to New England, an environmentally focused region that long has felt the effects of drifting emissions from Rust Belt states.

Australia's noxious cane toad is wiping out populations of a unique miniature crocodile, researchers warned Wednesday, with fears the warty, toxic creature could extinguish the rare reptile.

A team from Charles Darwin University studying the impacts of the foul toad in upstream escarpments found "significant declines" in numbers of dwarf freshwater crocodiles after the amphibians' arrival.

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).