Canada's environment minister unveiled Tuesday new regulations to improve fuel efficiency and halve the greenhouse gas emissions of passenger vehicles and light trucks.

The tougher standards, which must still be approved by parliament, would apply to model years 2017 to 2025 and align Canada's regulatory regime with the United States.

Sea levels are rising 60-percent faster than the U.N.'s climate panel forecast in its most recent assessment, scientists reported on Wednesday.

At present, sea levels are increasing at an average 3.2 millimetres (0.125 inches) per year, a trio of specialists reported in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

South Korea held a final dress rehearsal Wednesday for its third attempt to send a satellite into orbit and join an elite space club that includes Asian powers China, Japan and India.

After two previous failures in 2009 and 2010, the 140-tonne Korea Space Launch Vehicle (KSLV-I) is scheduled to blast off some time after 4:00pm (0700 GMT) Thursday from the Naro Space Center on the south coast.

Deforestation of Brazil's Amazon has slowed for a fourth consecutive year to its lowest rate since authorities began monitoring the world's largest rainforest, officials said Tuesday.

The National Institute of Space Research found that the Amazon lost 4,656 square kilometers (1,797 square miles) of rain forest over a period running from August 2011 to July 2012, 27 percent less than the previous year.

A group of American scientists met in Tokyo on Tuesday to study last year's Fukushima nuclear accident in hopes of finding lessons to improve the safety of U.S. atomic power reactors.

Norman Neureiter, head of the 22-member committee of the National Academy of Sciences, said the tsunami-spawned disaster at Fukushima nuclear power plant and its continuing impact have caused widespread concerns about the safety of nuclear energy.

China on Tuesday "successfully" launched a European-made telecommunications satellite into orbit aboard a Chinese rocket, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The satellite, made by Thales Alenia Space, will provide telecommunications services for customers in Asia, Africa and Europe, the report said, but did not name them.

Researchers have found bacteria thriving beneath ice, in the dark and without oxygen in a lake in Antarctica, pushing the boundaries of what was thought necessary to sustain life on Earth.

It is an extreme environment that also could exist elsewhere in our solar system, suggesting the possibility of conditions for life to exist somewhere that is not this planet.

Australia's native animals are being fed nauseating sausages of cane toad meat in a bid to train them against eating the foul, toxic species as it spreads into new areas, researchers said Tuesday.

Cane toads, a warty, leathery creature with a venom sac on their heads toxic enough to kill snakes and crocodiles, are advancing across north-western Australia at a speed of 50 kilometers (31 miles) a year.

The U.S. defended its track record on fighting climate change on Monday at U.N. talks, saying it's making "enormous" efforts to slow global warming and help the poor nations most affected by it.

Other countries have accused Washington of hampering the climate talks ever since the Bush administration abandoned the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty limiting emissions of heat-trapping gases by industrialized countries. As negotiators met for a two-week session in oil and gas-rich Qatar, U.S. delegate Jonathan Pershing suggested America deserves more credit.

An army of rice-grain-sized beetles, attracted by warming weather, has moved into Canada's western forests, where its tree massacre is causing the mercury to rise yet further, a study said Sunday.

The voracious horde of mountain pine beetles has invaded about 170,000 square kilometers (65,000 square miles) -- a fifth of the forest area of British Columbia, Canada's western-most province, a research team wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience.