Accompanied by a fleet of astronauts spanning NASA's entire existence, Atlantis made a slow, solemn journey to retirement Friday, the last space shuttle to orbit the world and the last to leave NASA's nest.

Atlantis reached its new home at the Kennedy Space Center's main tourist stop close to sundown, after a one-way road trip that spanned nearly 12 hours.

Brazil's Salto Morato Nature Preserve is a haven for scientists studying the dwindling Atlantic rainforest, an area less renowned than the Amazon forest but just as biologically diverse and equally threatened by human encroachment.

The preserve in Guaraquecaba, in the southeastern state of Parana, covers a corner of what was once a huge littoral rainforest known as the Mata Atlantica.

Two spacewalking astronauts worked on a leaky radiator system outside the International Space Station on Thursday, just hours after barely dodging a menacing piece of orbiting junk.

NASA ordered the space station to change position Wednesday evening to avoid a fragment from a communication satellite that was destroyed in a high-speed collision three years ago.

Another messy — and wintry — storm may cause post-Election Day problems for an already weather-weary East Coast, forecasters say.

But meteorologists add that it's six days out, so that's rather early to get too worried. The forecast could change before it hits late next week.

On a trek across this Atlantic rainforest reserve in southern Brazil, biologist Michel Garey recalled how on his birthday in 2007 he chanced upon what turned out to be a new species of tiny, three-fingered frogs.

"I was doing research with two friends on a hilltop in the reserve and I stumbled into this unusual frog with only three fingers," he told a small group of reporters this week on a tour of Salto Morato, a nature preserve owned by Brazil's leading cosmetic firm Boticario.

Conservation groups expressed outrage Friday after resistance led by China and Russia stymied efforts to carve out new marine sanctuaries and protect thousands of species across Antarctica.

Hopes were high that a reserve covering 1.6 million square kilometers (640,000 square miles) would be green-lighted for the pristine Ross Sea, the world's most intact marine ecosystem.

A smog-like haze that hung over part of Alaska's Kodiak Island this week was courtesy of a volcanic eruption — 100 years ago.

The National Weather Service says strong winds and a lack of snow Tuesday helped stir up ash from the 1912 eruption of Novarupta, the largest volcanic blast of the 20th century.

Polish geologists have unearthed the largest meteorite ever found in Eastern Europe and are hoping the rare find will provide fresh clues about the composition of the Earth's inner core, they said Wednesday.

"We know the Earth's core is composed of iron, but we can't study it. Here we have a guest from outer space which is similar in structure and we can easily examine it," Professor Andrzej Muszynski told reporters in Poznan, western Poland, where the find was made public Wednesday.

Palaeontologists in China said Wednesday they had found the world's oldest flying fish, a strange, snub-nosed creature that glided over water in a bid to evade predators some 240 million years ago.

Fossils in Chinese museum collections have been dusted off, dated and categorised to reveal that the flying fish is a much older creature than thought, the palaeontologists wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Was Hurricane Sandy caused by climate change?

This was the contention Tuesday of Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York state, which bore the brunt of the superstorm.