Researchers say a pair of fossils unearthed in the hills north of Las Vegas belonged to a saber-toothed cat.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that a team from California's San Bernardino County Museum identified the fossils dug up in June as being front leg bones from the extinct predator.

Ebb and Flow chased each other around the moon for nearly a year, peering into the interior. With dwindling fuel supplies, the twin NASA spacecraft are ready for a dramatic finish.

On Monday, they will plunge — seconds apart — into a mountain near the moon's north pole. It's a carefully choreographed ending so that they don't end up crashing into the Apollo landing sites or any other place on the moon with special importance.

A Soyuz spacecraft atop a towering rocket was placed into launch position Monday at Russia's manned-space facility in the freezing, windswept steppes of Kazakhstan ahead of a five-month mission for three astronauts to the International Space Station.

The craft was rolled out of its hangar on a flatbed train at exactly 7 a.m. in strict accordance with tradition and crawled for two hours at a walking pace to the launch pad. Colleagues, friends and relatives of the astronauts withstood temperatures as low as minus-30 C (minus-22 F), worsened by wind, to watch the procedure.

A mega-quake in 1255 that wrecked the Nepalese capital, wiped out a third of the population of Kathmandu Valley and killed the country's monarch, King Abhaya Malla, was of a kind that may return to the Himalayas, seismologists reported on Sunday.

Experts from Nepal, France and Singapore mapped deposits of river sediment displaced along part of the fault line where the Indian subcontinent slams into the Asia tectonic plate at up to 50 millimeters (1.97 inches) per year.

The roar of chainsaws has replaced birdsong, the once-lush, green jungle scorched to a barren grey. The equivalent of six football pitches of forest is lost every minute in Indonesia.

The disappearance of the trees has pushed thousands of animals -- from the birds they harbor and sustain to orangutans, gibbons and black panthers -- out of their natural homes and habitats.

A major report on climate change being compiled by the United Nation's climate science panel was on Friday leaked online in what appeared to be an attempt by a climate sceptic to discredit the panel.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the full draft of its Fifth Assessment Report, which is not set for official publication until next September, had been published online by one of 800 experts contributing to the report.

Researchers have discovered a new slow loris species in the jungles of Borneo, according to findings published this week in the American Journal of Primatology.

Known for its toxic bite, the slow loris -- a nocturnal primate found across Southeast Asia -- is closely related to a lemur and is characterized by unique fur coloration on its face and body.

Australia Saturday announced plans to drill a 2,000 year-old ice core in the heart of Antarctica in a bid to retrieve a frozen record of how the planet has evolved and what might be in store.

The Aurora Basin North project involves scientists from Australia, France, Denmark and the United States who hope it will also advance the search for the scientific "holy grail" of the million-year-old ice core.

To millions of people, the Christmas tree is a cheerful sight. To scientists who decipher the DNA codes of plants and animals, it's a monster.

We're talking about the conifer, the term for cone-bearing trees like the spruce, fir, pine, cypress and cedar. Apart from their holiday popularity, they play big roles in the lumber industry and in healthy forest ecosystems.

Nearly 4 out of 5 Americans now think temperatures are rising and that global warming will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.

Belief and worry about climate change are inching up among Americans in general, but concern is growing faster among people who don't often trust scientists on the environment. In follow-up interviews, some of those doubters said they believe their own eyes as they've watched thermometers rise, New York City subway tunnels flood, polar ice melt and Midwestern farm fields dry up.