A critically endangered Sumatran tiger has given birth to three cubs at an Indonesian zoo, a veterinarian at the facility said Wednesday.

"She gave birth naturally, without human intervention. The three cubs are all healthy. Two are male, while we haven't been able to get close to the other to identify it," Suci Terawan, a vet at Medan Zoo in northern Sumatra, told Agence France Presse.

A group of Tasmanian devils will be transferred to a small Australian island to start what is hoped will be a self-sustaining population, free from the facial tumor that has devastated their species.

Tasmania's Environment Minister Brian Wightman said 14 of the marsupials, carefully selected from captive breeding programs across Australia, would be released Thursday on Maria Island, a nature sanctuary off the state's east coast.

Scientists in China said on Tuesday they had sequenced the DNA of the wild bactrian camel, a threatened species with an extraordinary ability to survive in extreme conditions.

The genetic code of Camelus bactrianus ferus -- a two-humped camel that now numbers less than 900 in the wild -- reveals 20,821 genes, many of them providing the metabolic tools to cope with days without food and water and a diet based on tough desert vegetation.

South Korea has urged Russia to send rocket parts as soon as possible so it can go ahead with an already-delayed satellite launch this month, an official said Tuesday.

Seoul wants to make another attempt to send the satellite into space between November 9 and 24 after last month's rocket launch was canceled because of a defective part.

Animal rights group PETA offered a $1,000 reward Tuesday for information on the killing of three critically-endangered Sumatran elephants near palm oil plantations in Indonesia.

The carcasses of three female elephants, including a year-old calf, were found rotting at the weekend in the jungle on Sumatra island outside the Tesso Nilo National Park, which is surrounded by palm oil plantations.

Tens of thousands of tourists, scientists and amateur astronomers who traveled from around the world to see a total solar eclipse in northern Australia may be getting shortchanged by the weather.

Forecasters were predicting cloudy skies around dawn Wednesday, when the moon will pass between the sun and Earth and plunge a slice of Australia's northeast into darkness. Many worried that they will miss a rare chance to view the celestial phenomenon.

Their numbers already threatened by a slow breeding rate and rapid habitat loss, China's endangered giant pandas now also risk losing their staple food, bamboo, to climate change, a report said Sunday.

A study in China's northwestern Qinling Mountains, home to around 270 pandas -- about a fifth of the world's wild population -- predicts a "substantial" bamboo decline this century as the globe warms.

A turtle breeding farm in the Cayman Islands has postponed plans to release 150 green sea turtles into the wild due to rough seas.

The government-owned Cayman Turtle Farm says the release planned for Sunday has been called off because of choppy waters. Officials expect to release the captive-bred creatures next weekend.

A half mile (800 meters) below the ground at Prudhoe Bay, above the vast oil field that helped trigger construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline, a drill rig has tapped what might one day be the next big energy source.

The U.S. Department of Energy and industry partners over two winters drilled into a reservoir of methane hydrate, which looks like ice but burns like a candle if a match warms its molecules. There is little need now for methane, the main ingredient of natural gas. With the boom in production from hydraulic fracturing, the United States is awash in natural gas for the near future and is considering exporting it, but the DOE wants to be ready with methane if there's a need.

A build-up of carbon dioxide in the upper levels of Earth's atmosphere risks causing a faster accumulation of man-made space junk and resulting in more collisions, scientists said on Sunday.

While it causes warming on Earth, CO2 conversely cools down the atmosphere and contracts its outermost layer, the thermosphere, where many satellites including the International Space Station (ISS) operate, said a study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.