A comet streaking through space with a European robot lab riding piggyback will skirt the Sun this week, setting another landmark in an extraordinary quest to unravel the origins of life on Earth.

Scientists hope the heat of perihelion -- when the comet comes closest to the Sun in its orbit -- will cause the enigmatic traveler to shed more of its icy crust.

A prosecutor in South Africa's Kruger National Park says rhino poaching cases appear in court like "shoplifting cases in the city", casting doubt on the country's anti-poaching strategy as it suffers another year of rhino carnage.

For the past six years, prosecutor Ansie Venter has been working on rhino poaching cases in Skukuza Magistrates' Court, the legal heart of the world-famous park.

Mad as a hornet, a bumblebee buzzes her wings in vain against the walls of the vial holding her captive. She alights briefly on the paper tab indicating her number, and then resumes scuttling around her plastic prison.

Her warden is Shaina Helsel, one soldier in a citizen army that is taking a census of Maine's bumblebees in an effort to secure the future of the state's blueberries, cranberries and tomatoes amid concern about the population of pollinators.

It has long been thought that wealthy countries, bolstered with more money for infrastructure investment, face lower risks of flooding.

But new research Thursday found that rich countries face major risks as climate change and human activity render coastal populations increasingly vulnerable to devastating river delta floods.

A Florida aquarium has reached an agreement with one in Cuba to cooperate on coral conservation efforts -- the first such arrangement since Washington and Havana normalized relations, the American marine institute said Wednesday.

"Although Cuba's reefs are only 90 miles (145 kilometers) away from Key West, they are in much better condition than our local reefs systems," said Thom Stork, president and CEO of The Florida Aquarium.

Puerto Ricans are learning to live without water on an island that already was suffering an economic crisis.

A severe drought is forcing businesses to temporarily close, public schools to cancel breakfast service and people to find creative ways to stay clean amid sweltering temperatures.

The world's first ever ant map showing the distribution of the tiny industrious creature around the globe was launched Thursday by the University of Hong Kong in a bid to shed more light on the insect world.

The colourful interactive online map (antmaps.org), which took four years to complete, displays the geographic locations of nearly 15,000 types of ant with the Australian state of Queensland home to the highest number of native species at more than 1,400.

NASA has extended a contract with Russia's space agency for $490 million to carry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station amid a lack of Congressional funding, the U.S. agency said Wednesday. 

The United States will continue to rely exclusively on Russia to take astronauts to the orbiting outpost under the new contract, which runs until 2019, even as relations between the two countries have reached their lowest point since the Cold War.

Barnacles on a wing part that washed up on a remote Indian Ocean island could yield new clues to the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 if it is from the plane, experts said Tuesday

The hunt for the Boeing 777, which disappeared on March 8 last year en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people aboard, has focused on the southern Indian Ocean off Australia.

A vast bloom of toxic algae off the U.S. West Coast is denser, more widespread and deeper than scientists feared even weeks ago, according to surveyors aboard a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research vessel.

This coastal ribbon of microscopic algae, up to 40 miles wide and 650 feet deep (60 kilometers wide and 200 meters deep) in places, is flourishing amid unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures. It now stretches from at least California to Alaska and has shut down lucrative fisheries. Shellfish managers on Tuesday doubled the area off Washington's coast that is closed to Dungeness crab fishing, after finding elevated levels of marine toxins in tested crab meat.