Two strong earthquakes 40 minutes apart rocked the remote South Orkney Islands in Antarctica on Sunday, experts from the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The epicenter of the first, a magnitude 6.6 temblor, was at a depth of 10 kilometers (six miles), some 539 kilometers (334 miles) west of Coronation Island, the USGS said. No destructive tsunami was created, according to a US-based warning center.

Two Chinese pandas got a red-carpet welcome Sunday when they arrived in Paris for a new life in a country zoo after Beijing put aside its differences with France and extended the hand of bear diplomacy.

The giant black and white bears -- dubbed Very Important Pandas by the French media -- arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport from Sichuan province in the "Panda Express", a Boeing 777 specially decorated with a panda motif.

South Africa announced Sunday it was beefing up the number of rangers in the world-renowned Kruger national park after an alarming jump in the number of rhinos slain by poachers for their horns.

"This ongoing poaching of our rhino population is a source of great concern for the government... It requires of us all as a collective to take drastic measures to help combat it," said Environment Minister Edna Molewa.

Huan Huan and Yuan Zi spent their last day at the panda breeding center in southwestern China ahead of a ten year trip to France, with a farewell ceremony held in their honor.

The two pandas at the center in the city of Chengdu will be flown to the French zoo they will call home for the next decade under an agreement reached between Paris and Beijing after years of top-level negotiations.

Russia's space agency said on Saturday its ill-starred Mars probe would crash into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile as the craft is expected to begin its final descent Sunday evening.

"The predicted window for the fragments of the Phobos-Grunt to fall to Earth is between January 15 and 16, with the central point on January 15 at 21:51 Moscow time (17:51 GMT)," the Roskosmos agency said in a statement.

Firing on all engines, NASA's latest rover to Mars executed a course adjustment Wednesday that put it on track for a landing in August.

Deep space antennas monitored the one-ton rover nicknamed Curiosity as it fired its thrusters in a choreographed three-hour maneuver.

China and India are catapulting to the forefront of astronomy research with their decision to join as partners in a Hawaii telescope that will be the world's largest when it's built later this decade.

China and India will pay a share of the construction cost — expected to top $1 billion — for the Thirty Meter Telescope at the summit of Mauna Kea volcano. They will also have a share of the observation time.

The International Space Station is dodging a softball-sized piece of space junk.

Mission Control told astronauts to fire the station's engines briefly Friday morning to avoid a piece of an old communications satellite.

There are simple, inexpensive ways to cut back on two major pollutants -- soot and methane -- and taking action now could slow climate change for years to come, international scientists said Thursday.

When it comes to fending off global warming, the focus often is on harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels in coal plants and car engines that linger in the atmosphere for many decades, said the study in Science.

The world's newest snake has menacing-looking yellow and black scales, dull green eyes and two spiky horns. And it's named after a 7-year-old girl.

Matilda's Horned Viper was discovered in a small patch of southwest Tanzania about two years ago and was introduced last month as the world's newest known snake species in an issue of Zootaxa.