An orphaned Alaska polar bear is getting a new temporary home in Buffalo, N.Y.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say the 3- to 4-month old cub is expected to be transported to the Buffalo Zoo sometime this spring to join the zoo's own cub, Luna.

The next book by primatologist Jane Goodall has been postponed because some passages were lifted from online sources and not properly credited.

Hachette Book Group announced Friday that no new release date has been set for Goodall's "Seeds of Hope," originally scheduled for April 2.

Sydney's skyline plunged into darkness on Saturday as the city cut its lights for the "Earth Hour" campaign against climate change, kicking off an event which will travel around the globe.

Organizers expect hundreds of millions of people across some 150 countries to turn off their lights for 60 minutes on Saturday night -- at 8:30pm local time -- in a symbolic show of support for the planet.

New rock dating techniques have helped narrow the timeframe of a chain of massive volcanic eruptions that wiped out half the world's species 200 million years ago, a study said Thursday.

The result is the most precise date yet -- 201,564,000 years ago -- for the event known as the End-Triassic Extinction, or the fourth mass extinction, said the study in the journal Science.

A new examination of what is essentially the universe's birth certificate allows astronomers to tweak the age, girth and speed of the cosmos, more secure in their knowledge of how it evolved, what it's made of and its ultimate fate.

Sure, the universe suddenly seems to be showing its age, now calculated at 13.8 billion years — 80 million years older than scientists had thought. It's got about 3 percent more girth — technically it's more matter than mysterious dark energy — and it is expanding about 3 percent more slowly.

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday unveiled the most detailed map yet of relic radiation from the Big Bang, revealing new data it hopes will shed light on the creation and expansion of our Universe.

The 50-million pixel, all-sky image of the oldest light adds an edge of precision to some existing cosmological theories, defining more precisely the composition of the Universe and its age -- about 80 million years older than previously thought.

China's coastal waters are suffering "acute" pollution, with the size of the worst affected areas soaring by more than 50 percent last year, an official body said.

The State Oceanic Administration (SOA) said 68,000 square kilometers (26,300 square miles) of sea had the worst official pollution rating in 2012, up 24,000 square kilometers on 2011.

Japanese researchers said Thursday they have found a rich deposit of rare earths on the Pacific seabed, with reports suggesting it could be up to 30 times more concentrated than Chinese reserves.

Mud samples taken from 5,800 meters (19,000 feet) below the waves contained highly concentrated amounts of the precious minerals, which are vital for high-tech manufacturing and used in products including wind turbines and iPods.

Five Greenpeace activists on Thursday chained themselves to Jerusalem's soaring Bridge of Strings demanding that U.S. President Barack Obama halt exploratory drilling in the Arctic, an Agence France Presse correspondent said.

Wearing white overalls and yellow helmets, the five used climbing gear to inch up the metal cables which spans a busy intersection at the entrance to the city.

Researchers in Germany said Tuesday they have completed the first high-quality sequencing of a Neanderthal genome and are making it freely available online for other scientists to study.

The genome produced from remains of a toe bone found in a Siberian cave is far more detailed than a previous "draft" Neanderthal genome sequenced three years ago by the same team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.