A rare bright comet shows up in the northern hemisphere this week, cruising past Earth with promise of spectacular naked-eye viewings of the giant ball of ice and dust streaking the twilight sky with a blazing tail.

Dubbed Pan-STARRS after the Hawaii-based telescope that first spotted it nearing our corner of the universe, the comet should be at its brightest from about Friday to the middle of next week, say astronomers.

Indonesia scientists say they are closely monitoring a smoking volcano on Java island, urging villagers and tourists to stay off the mountain's slope.

Government volcanologist Hendra Gunawan said Thursday that Mount Tangkuban Perahu in West Java province shot up smoke and ash nearly 500 meters (1,640 feet) into the air since Monday, and was placed at the second-highest alert level.

The subatomic particle whose discovery was announced amid much fanfare last year, is looking "more and more" like it could indeed be the elusive Higgs boson believed to explain why matter has mass, scientists said Wednesday.

But in the latest update, physicists told a conference in La Thuile, Italy, that more analysis is needed before a definitive statement can be made.

A 33,000-year-old tooth found in Siberia offers new evidence about the prehistoric ancestry of man's best friend, according to a new study out Wednesday in a U.S. journal.

Dogs were already domesticated by the advent of agriculture, 10,000 years ago, but scientists still don't know how far back the history goes or just when and where the modern species we know as dogs became distinct from wild wolves.

The deep-space Herschel telescope, launched four years ago to observe the creation of stars, will soon be going out of service as its supply of instrument coolant runs out, the European Space Agency said on Tuesday.

When it was launched in May 2009, Herschel became the largest and most powerful infrared telescope in space and has made several discoveries, ranging "from starburst galaxies in the distant universe to newly forming planetary systems orbiting nearby young stars", the ESA said.

China will sharply boost renewable energy this year, it said Tuesday, after repeated bouts of heavy pollution across much of the country heightened public anger on the issue over recent weeks.

The country plans to increase hydropower generating capacity by 21 million kilowatts this year, wind by 18 million kilowatts and solar energy by 10 million kilowatts, the National Development and Reform Commission said in a report.

Millions of people in western India are suffering their worst drought in more than four decades, with critics blaming official ineptitude and corruption for exacerbating the natural water shortage.

Central areas of Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is the capital, are facing a water shortage worse than the severe drought in 1972, the state's chief minister Prithviraj Chavan told Agence France Presse.

New U.S. government figures show the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air jumped dramatically in 2012, making it very unlikely that global warming can be limited to another 2 degrees (1.2 C). Many governments set a 2-degree increase as the upper limit.

Scientists say the rise in CO2 reflects the global economy revving up and burning more fossil fuels, especially in China.

Ancient, mummified camel bones dug from the tundra confirm that the animals now synonymous with the arid sands of Arabia actually developed in subfreezing forests in what is now Canada's High Arctic, a scientist said Tuesday.

About 3.5 million years ago, Strathcona Fiord on Ellesmere Island's west-central coast would have looked more like a northern forest than an Arctic landscape, said paleobotanist Natalia Rybczynski of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.

A recently discovered comet is closer than it's ever been to Earth, and stargazers in the Northern Hemisphere finally get to see it.

Called Pan-STARRS, the comet is passing within 100 million miles (160. million kilometers) of Earth on Tuesday, its closest approach. The ice ball will get even nearer the sun this weekend — just 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) from the sun. That's within the orbit of Mercury.