Since it awoke in August from a 138-year slumber, Ecuador's Cotopaxi volcano has become one of the most-watched in the world, holding wary locals and fascinated scientists in thrall.

Cotopaxi, whose snowy peak rises majestically from the patchwork quilt of central Ecuador's high plains, rumbled to life on August 14, belching a column of ash in its first major eruption since 1877.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet will carry the text of any climate change deal clinched in Paris in December into space with him next year, a French junior minister for research said on Thursday.

"We truly hope to be able to give you the text of the final resolution," Thierry Mandon told a news conference in Paris, adding that he was still hopeful of an agreement next month despite "much uncertainty" surrounding the talks.

A chimpanzee mother cared for her disabled infant in the wild in Tanzania, Japanese researchers reported in a study published this week, research they hope will help in understanding the evolution of social care in humans.

A team of Kyoto University researchers discovered that a "severely disabled" female chimpanzee baby was born in a group in Tanzania's Mahale Mountains National Park in 2011, and recorded behavior of the group for about two years.

A year ago on Thursday, the world held its collective breath as a European spacecraft dropped a tiny robot lab onto the surface of a comet hurtling towards the Sun.

The 12 months since that bumpy landing have yielded many exciting scientific finds, and more than a little drama, as Philae intermittently phoned home from its alien host between long bouts of sleep.

Two U.S. astronauts stepped out on a risky spacewalk Friday to complete the repair of an ammonia cooling system at the International Space Station.

Highly toxic ammonia is used to cool electronics at the orbiting outpost, and the thermal system has been plagued by problems.

A drought caused by the El Nino weather phenomenon is worrying farmers in the Colombian Andes who fear for their crop -- one of the world's most prized coffee beans.

"The harvest is about to be lost. We farmers are in total despair," said Raul Fajardo, 56, who grows coffee beans at 1,800 meters (5,900 feet) altitude on the slopes of the Galeras volcano.

A third of China's forests are under threat despite the Communist Party announcing a ban on commercial logging in natural forest, activists said Wednesday.

Vast swathes of woodlands have been destroyed during China's decades-long economic boom, but environmental concerns are rising up the agenda and the measure was included in guidelines the ruling party issued for the country's next five-year plan.

Astronauts celebrated 15 years of circling the Earth aboard the International Space Station Monday, a new milestone for an orbiting space lab that some say deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

With operations expected to last another decade, the world's space agencies are now looking to the outpost to provide key data on how future space pioneers may withstand the rigors of venturing further, perhaps even to Mars.

A British tree thought to be up to 5,000 years old has started to change sex, a "rare and unusual" phenomenon not fully understood by scientists, a botanist said Monday.

The Fortingall Yew, in Perthshire, central Scotland has for hundreds of years been recorded as male, but has recently begun sprouting berries, suggesting that at least part of the tree is changing gender.

A massive space rock that will shave by Earth on Halloween looks like a dead comet with a skull face, NASA said after gaining a closer look at the spooky space junk.

Astronomers initially thought the object was an asteroid when they spotted it in early October, and named it Asteroid 2015 TB145.