U.S. agriculture officials said Friday the discovery of genetically engineered wheat in an Oregon field appears to be an isolated incident.

The plants, modified to be resistant to Monsanto herbicide, were discovered last month and led some Asian importers to halt or suspend trade with U.S. wheat growers while an investigation was launched.

A debilitating row with Russia at U.N. climate talks this week exposed a fundamental flaw in how decisions are taken -- the entire system balanced precariously on an ill-defined notion of consensus, observers say.

While furious with Russia for allowing the issue to stop important work at a meeting in Bonn, negotiators agree the decision-making procedure must be clarified before any long-term damage is caused.

U.N. climate negotiations were drawing to a close in Bonn on Friday with delegates reporting progress despite Russia blocking a key working group.

With just over two years remaining before the deadline for a new, universal climate pact, the talks in the former German capital sought to lay important groundwork for the next ministerial-level huddle in Warsaw, Poland, in November.

Warming ocean waters are melting the Antarctic ice shelves from the bottom up, researchers said Thursday in the first comprehensive study of the thick platforms of floating ice.

Scientists have long known that basal melt, the melting of ice shelves from underneath, was taking place and attributed the trend to icebergs breaking off the platforms.

On June 16, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly into space in a scientific feat that was a major propaganda coup for the Soviet Union.

Two years after Yuri Gagarin's historic first manned flight, Tereshkova blasted off in a Vostok-6 spaceship, becoming a national heroine at the age of 26.

Scientists with the Smithsonian Institution have discovered at least one new fish species at a deep reef off Curacao while conducting a yearlong project to gather data on temperature and biodiversity for monitoring climate change effects in the Caribbean.

The discovery occurred in recent weeks off the southern edge of the Dutch Caribbean island as scientists used a submarine to explore depths up to 1,000 feet (305 meters).

Palaeontologists have made the surprising evolutionary discovery that ancient Australian fish may have had abdominal muscles, previously thought to have only developed in land animals.

Researchers mapping the oldest fossilized vertebrate muscles ever seen -- in Gogo fish thought to be 380 million years old -- worked out the position of the muscles and the orientation of the muscle fibers.

Far beyond the caress of sunlight, micro-organisms are flourishing at great depths beneath the ocean floor, scientists reported on Wednesday.

U.S. biologists looked for telltale scraps of genetic code in a core drilled deep into the sedimentary floor of the Pacific Ocean off Peru.

It's just a tiny thing -- a single-celled organism visible only under a microscope -- yet it is one of the most successful life forms on the planet.

So say scientists who on Wednesday published the DNA code of an ocean alga called Emiliania huxleyi, whose astonishing adaptability enables it to thrive in waters from the equator to the sub-Arctic.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard joined forces with former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Thursday to urge global action on climate change, saying politics must be put aside.

The unlikely pair met in Perth and jointly penned an opinion piece that ran in News Limited newspapers.