Frustration grew Friday with the Qatari hosts of U.N. climate talks stuttering towards a close in Doha, for failing to instil a sense of urgency in negotiators preparing themselves for a long night.

As some delegates urged conference chairman Abdullah Bin Hamad al-Attiyah to take matters in hand, he quipped in a stock-taking session: "I am not in a rush. I am at home. My house is only 10 minutes driving distance so I'd love you to stay here more days."

Animal rights activists on Friday renewed calls for a Singapore casino complex to free dolphins it acquired for a marine park, threatening to campaign for a boycott if their demand is ignored.

The Animal Concerns Research & Education Society (ACRES) of Singapore claimed the bottlenose dolphins were "being housed in appalling conditions, in tiny barren swimming pools" at Resorts World Sentosa (RWS).

NASA, the agency that epitomized the "Right Stuff," seems lost in space and doesn't have a clear sense of where it is going, an independent panel of science and engineering experts said in a stinging report Wednesday.

The one place the White House wants to send astronauts — an asteroid — doesn't seem to be getting the engines firing at NASA, they said.

Two former top NASA officials unveiled plans Thursday to sell manned flights to the moon by the end of the decade, in an announcement 40 years after the last human set foot there.

Spaceflight, long the province of national governments, has moved toward increased commercialization in recent years, with private companies for the first time successfully launching rockets into orbit.

Scientists Friday warned of an alarming increase in the death rates of the largest living organisms on the planet, the giant, old trees that harbor and sustain countless birds and wildlife.

Research by universities in Australia and the United States, published in Science, said ecosystems worldwide were in danger of losing forever their largest and oldest trees unless there were policy changes to better protect them.

Two Mexican textile factories that supply clothing for global fashion brands such as Levi's are dumping toxic chemicals into the environment, Greenpeace said Wednesday.

The environmental group said it found hazardous chemicals in samples taken from waste water discharges at the two facilities, run by Mexico's Lavamex and Kaltex companies, which dye and wash denim textiles.

Mosquito control officials in the Florida Keys are waiting for the federal government to sign off on an experiment that would release hundreds of thousands of genetically modified mosquitoes to reduce the risk of dengue fever in the tourist town of Key West.

If approved by the Food and Drug Administration, it would be the first such experiment in the U.S. Some Key West residents worry, though, that not enough research has been done to determine the risks that releasing genetically modified mosquitoes might pose to the Keys' fragile ecosystem.

Covering nearly 300 football fields in a remote patch of desert, the Shams 1 solar project carries off plenty of symbolic significance for the United Arab Emirates.

It will be the first, large-scale solar project in the oil-rich country when it is completed at the end of the year, and the largest of its kind in the Middle East. At full capacity, the 100-megawatt, concentrated solar project will be able to power 20,000 homes. For those behind the project, it's the surest sign yet that solar is coming to the region in a big way.

New images of the Moon's battered crust point to a violent past in which it was battered by comets and asteroids during its first billion years, U.S. scientists say.

The new findings come from the GRAIL mission, a pair of spacecraft named Ebb and Flow that are orbiting the Moon and measuring its gravitational field.

Cigarette butts are widely reviled as an urban nuisance but birds in Mexico City see them as a boon, apparently using them to deter parasites from their nests, scientists say.

Local sparrows and finches incorporate smoked cigarette butts in their nests to provide cosy cellulose lining for their chicks and nicotine to ward off mites, they believe.