Chimpanzees in a midlife crisis? It sounds like a setup for a joke.

But there it is, in the title of a report published Monday in a scientific journal: "Evidence for a midlife crisis in great apes."

The U.N. weather agency says concentrations of the main global warming pollutant in the world's air reached a record high in 2011.

The World Meteorological Organization says the planet averaged 390 parts per million of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, up 40 percent from before the Industrial Age when levels were about 275 parts per million.

South Korea is set to go ahead next week with a delayed rocket launch as it aims to join the elite club of nations capable of putting a satellite into orbit, an official said Tuesday.

The project has been plagued with problems, with failed attempts in 2009 and 2010, and a successful launch this time is considered crucial to South Korea's commercial space ambitions.

Europe faces key decisions this week about its role in space, pondering plans for a new rocket and its involvement in the International Space Station at a time of money crunch.

Meeting in Naples on Tuesday and Wednesday, science ministers from the European Space Agency's 20 member states will be asked to set a multi-year program with billions of euros at stake for the highly successful space industry.

A New Zealand volcano that featured as Mount Doom in "The Lord of the Rings" movies is in danger of erupting as pressure builds in a subterranean vent, officials said on Monday.

The Department of Conservation (DOC) warned hikers to avoid the summit of Mount Ruapehu, saying that temperature readings by scientists indicated there was an increased risk of eruption at New Zealand's largest active volcano.

The World Bank warned Sunday that global temperatures could rise by four degrees this century without immediate action, with potentially devastating consequences for coastal cities and the poor.

Issuing a call for action, the World Bank tied the future wealth of the planet -- and especially developing regions -- to immediate efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions from sources such as energy production.

A Russian cosmonaut and two astronauts from the International Space Station touched down early Monday on the steppes of Kazakhstan in a Russian Soyuz capsule after spending over four months aboard the ISS.

Russia's Yury Malenchenko, Sunita Williams of the U.S. and Akihiko Hoshide of Japan touched down as scheduled just before 0200 GMT, the Russian Space Flight Control Center announced as the message "Landing Accomplished" was flashed on a giant screen.

The population of Uganda's mountain gorillas has grown to 400, up from 302 in 2006, according to a census conducted last year, bringing the total number of mountain gorillas in Africa to 880 and giving hope to conservationists trying to save the critically endangered species.

Uganda is now home to nearly half of the world's mountain gorillas remaining in the wild, a source of confidence for a country that has come to depend heavily on the popular apes for substantial tourism revenue. The rest of the surviving mountain gorillas — the species Gorilla beringei beringei — are in Congo and Rwanda.

Astronomers using a complex system of super telescopes have caught a glimpse of what is likely the most distant, and thus oldest, galaxy ever seen -- some 13.3 billion light years from Earth.

The star cluster was observed in its infancy -- as it looked when the Universe was just three percent of its present age, NASA and the European Space Agency announced.

Could pigs be an unexpected source for transmitting the deadly Ebola virus?

That is the question raised by a Canadian lab study, which says six piglets deliberately infected with Ebola passed the virus on to macaque monkeys housed in wire cages inside their pig pen.