Two vast marine sanctuaries proposed for Antarctica were being considered for a fifth time at international talks Monday with campaigners saying they are imperative to protect one of the world's last untouched wildernesses.

The fate of the plans to shield critical areas of ocean around the frozen continent is in the hands of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), which opened its annual meeting in Hobart.

The calendar says it's still spring in Rio de Janeiro, but the coastal Brazilian city is suffering through one of the most severe bouts of hot weather of the past century.

For a second consecutive day on Friday, the mercury hit 43 degrees Celsius (more than 109 degrees Fahrenheit), the third hottest temperature recorded on this date in nearly a hundred years of record-keeping, according to the National Institute of Meteorology (INMET).

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is "reasonably optimistic" about a world climate conference due to open in Paris at the end of next month, he said in an interview published Thursday.

"I am still reasonably optimistic that world leaders will be able to adopt a universal protocol on climate change before the end of the year," he told Italy's Corriere della Sera daily.

Pollution in nearly 80 percent of Chinese cities surveyed by Greenpeace "greatly exceeded" national standards over the first nine months of this year, the advocacy group said on Thursday.

The average level of PM2.5 particulates -- small enough to deeply penetrate the lungs -- in the 367 cities tested was also more than four times the maximum recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), Greenpeace said.

An Australian zoo Wednesday unveiled a baby chimp adopted by a pregnant female in an "unheard of" act after his mother died during birth.

The baby, whose name Boon means blessing, was orphaned when mum Soona died shortly after he was born at Monarto Zoo, southeast of Adelaide, late last week.

A new method to chemically analyze dinosaur egg shells has allowed scientists to gauge the extinct lizards' body temperature, researchers said on Tuesday.

The findings support recent work by other teams that dinosaurs were neither warm- nor cold-blooded, but somewhere in between, researchers wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

Scientists Thursday warned the world faced mass global coral bleaching next year driven by the warming effects of the El Nino weather phenomenon, and it could be the worst on record.

A study by the University of Queensland and the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration said it would be only the third recorded global bleaching event in history, with areas such as Australia's Great Barrier Reef set to be hard hit.

A monkey that sneezes when it rains and a "walking" fish are among more than 200 species discovered in the fragile eastern Himalayas in recent years, according to conservation group WWF.

WWF has compiled a survey of wildlife discovered by scientists across Bhutan, northeast India, Nepal, north Myanmar and southern Tibet in a bid to raise awareness of the threats facing the ecologically sensitive region.

You've seen the images from Pluto. Now, the lead scientist of the historic NASA expedition is ready to tell the whole story.

Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, has a deal with Picador for a "behind the scenes" account of July's flyby.

An unmanned Russian cargo ship has docked with the International Space Station, bringing the astronauts aboard 2.3 tons (2.5 short tons) of supplies ranging from air to garlic.

The Progress M-29M spacecraft blasted off from Russia's space launch complex in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, on Thursday night docked with the space station shortly before 2 a.m. Moscow time Friday (2300 GMT Thursday).