Activists warned Thursday that wild populations of Southeast Asia's striking Tokay Gecko were in danger of being over-hunted for use in traditional medicine in China and other countries.

Calling the trade "colossal", wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC called on authorities in the region to implement tougher regulations and limits on commerce involving the lizard, the second-largest gecko species.

A letter the British scientist who co-discovered the structure of DNA wrote to his son announcing the news sold Wednesday for a record sum of just over $6 million, Christie's said.

Elizabeth Van Bergen, a spokeswoman for the auction house in New York, said the sale "did make the new world auction record for a letter and was sold for $6,059,750."

Two Greenpeace activists dressed as polar bears boarded an oil platform in Norway on Wednesday to protest against Norwegian oil and gas group Statoil's planned drilling in the Arctic.

"No oil company in the world is prepared for Arctic conditions," said the head of Greenpeace Norway, Truls Gulowsen, one of the two activists who boarded the West Hercules platform currently stationed in Oelen in southwestern Norway.

Ma Wangzhen walks in the desert that threatens to engulf her onion farm on the edge of the ancient Chinese city of Dunhuang in China's northwest Gansu province, on October 25, 2007. Loss of land …more

Loss of land through desertification and drought costs up to five percent of world agricultural gross domestic product (AGDP), or some $450 billion (340 billion euros), every year, said a study presented at a U.N. conference Tuesday.

Fledglings of a southern African bird species threaten suicide to blackmail their parents into bringing them more food, scientists said Wednesday.

When hungry, pied babbler fledglings flutter from the nest to the ground, where predators roam, and start screeching to highlight their plight, said a study published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It's been frozen, baked, suffocated and sprayed with toxins... and each time the bedbug bounces back, leaving tiny bite marks on legs or arms where it takes a blood meal.

But thanks to an unusual combination of Balkan folklore and nanoscale science, the pesky critter may have met its match.

Flights will become bumpier as global warming destabilises air currents at altitudes used by commercial airliners, climate scientists warned Monday.

Already, atmospheric turbulence injures hundreds of airline passengers each year, sometimes fatally, damaging aircraft and costing the industry an estimated $150 million (115 million euros), scientists said.

Which is more important, pandas or pinot?

Researchers say that is a question conservationists and wine-growers will have to answer in the coming years as climate change sparks a hunt for cooler places to grow wine grapes, even if those places are home to sensitive animal populations.

The eternal question of whether penis size matters to women has been probed by a team of international scientists who reported on Monday that yes, ladies do find larger men more attractive.

What's more, prehistoric women who could see the sex organs of their scantily clad male counterparts may have helped influence the evolution of larger genitals in men by choosing to mate with partners who were bigger.

The big rigs rattling past smokestacks sure don't make this Chicago roadway look like the greenest street in America.

But their tires roll over smog-eating pavement, the streetlights run on solar and wind power, the sidewalks were made with recycled concrete, and shrub-filled "bioswales" keep storm water out of overtaxed sewers.