For 15 years Aurelien Brule has lived in the Indonesian jungle, crusading against palm oil multinationals, loggers and corruption in his bid to save endangered gibbons from annihilation.

He admits that his is a losing battle. The primates are being pushed out of their natural habitat by loggers removing the equivalent of six football fields-worth of jungle "every minute" to make way for palm oil plantations.

Native American and Alaska Native leaders told of their villages being under water because of coastal erosion, droughts and more on Thursday during a Senate hearing intended to draw attention to how climate change is affecting tribal communities.

The environmental changes being seen in native communities are "a serious and growing issue and Congress needs to address them," Tex Hall, chairman of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of New Town, N.D., said Wednesday.

The world's first industrial plant producing biofuels from seaweed will be built in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco in late 2013, the official in charge of the project said Thursday.

The factory to be set up by Austrian firm SAT on a sugar cane plantation that yields ethanol, will produce 1.2 million liters of algae-based biofuels annually, Rafael Bianchini, head of SAT's Brazilian subsidiary, told Agence France Presse.

Astronomers said Wednesday they had stumbled upon an astonishing spiral galaxy that was born nearly 11 billion years ago, a finding that could spur a rethink of how galaxies formed after the Big Bang.

Dubbed BX442, the ancient star cluster was discovered in a survey of 300 distant galaxies carried out by the powerful Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

German researchers on Wednesday said they had evidence that sowing the ocean with iron particles sucks up and stores carbon dioxide (CO2), preventing the gas from stoking dangerous climate change.

But their work, touching on a fiercely controversial issue called geo-engineering, came under attack from other scientists and environmentalists.

A second nuclear reactor has begun working in Japan, officials said Thursday, the day after its operator was ordered to examine a possible active tectonic fault directly under the plant.

Kansai Electric Power Co. (KEPCO), which runs the Oi power plant in the nation's industrial heartland, said it switched on Unit No. 4 late Wednesday, following the restart of Unit No. 3 reactor earlier this month.

The science world has added an unusual tribute to the long list of accolades bestowed on Nelson Mandela, naming a prehistoric woodpecker after South Africa's first black president, who turns 94 Wednesday.

The anti-apartheid icon has already seen his name conferred on a species of spider, a nuclear particle, an American rescue dog, a tree, several sub-groups of flower, numerous race horses and a flat in a television sitcom.

An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan tore off one of Greenland's largest glaciers, illustrating another dramatic change to the warming island.

For several years, scientists had been watching a long crack near the tip of the northerly Petermann Glacier. On Monday, NASA satellites showed it had broken completely, freeing an iceberg measuring 46 square miles.

U.N. culture and science body UNESCO on Tuesday awarded a prize financed by the leader of Equatorial Guinea despite fierce criticism from rights groups who decried the move as "shameful".

Rights groups and Western nations have condemned the life sciences award, financed to the tune of $3 million (2.5 million euros) over five years, because of accusations that President Teodoro Obiang Nguema rules with an iron grip and heads a government festering with corruption.

Through a labyrinth of hallways deep inside a 1950s-era building that has housed research that dates back to the origins of U.S. space travel, a group of scientists in white coats is stirring, mixing, measuring, brushing and, most important, tasting the end result of their cooking.

Their mission: Build a menu for a planned journey to Mars in the 2030s.