Almost a third of all apes, monkeys and other primates are in danger of extinction because of rampant habitat destruction, the commercial sale of their meat and the trade in illegal wildlife, a report released Friday said.
Captured by Confederate sailors in a bloody midnight sneak attack in 1864, the gunboat Water Witch became one of the few Civil War ships to sail under the flags of both the Confederate and Union navies. Archaeologists say they found strong evidence Thursday they've located the Water Witch's wreckage buried under more than 10 feet of mud in the Vernon River south of Savannah.
Grizzly bears in the region in and around Yellowstone National Park have suffered unusually high mortality rates so far this year, likely because of a dearth of natural food sources, a researcher said.
A large stretch of the rugged, pristine northern shore of Lake Superior will become the world's largest freshwater marine protected area, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced Thursday.
Latin America and other poor regions of the world will bear the brunt of climate change, a top official from the organization that shared this year's Nobel Peace Prize said Thursday.
The image of Neanderthals may be in need of a makeover: scientists say at least some of these extinct hominids could have had fair skin and red hair.
The international community must respond more quickly to climate change, species extinction, dwindling supplies of fresh water and other threats to the planet, the U.N. Environment Program warned Thursday.
Astronauts aboard space shuttle Discovery and the international space station joined forces Thursday, linking their ships and kicking off the biggest construction job ever attempted by a single team in orbit.
A Coast Guard reconnaissance team is heading to the far north this week to scope out a new frontier that the warming Arctic climate is opening to ship traffic.
NASA is flying an unmanned aircraft outfitted with high-tech imaging equipment to help firefighters battling wildfires raging across Southern California.
The U.S. Board of Geographic Names has chosen to name an island off the western edge of the Antarctic peninsula after a husband-and-wife team of University of Alabama at Birmingham scientists who spent 30 years working in the cold waters off the continent.
James Watson, the Nobel laureate who sparked an international furor last week with comments about intelligence levels among blacks, has retired from his post at a prestigious research institution.
Researchers at New Mexico's two largest universities are painting a grim picture of New Mexico's economic and agricultural future with predictions that climate change will mean less water in the Rio Grande watershed.
A person's optimism in the future seems to be controlled by a small front part of the mid-brain, according to a study that used brain imaging.
Embarking on an ambitious 10-year moon exploration program, China launched its first lunar probe Wednesday — a leap forward in the Asian space race that gave a boost to national pride, and the promise of scientific and military payoffs.
Discovery's astronauts used lasers and digital cameras Wednesday to examine the shuttle's wings for any signs of launch damage as they gained on the international space station with every circling of Earth.
Whenever the world's tropical seas warm several degrees, Earth has experienced mass extinctions over millions of years, according to a first-of-its-kind statistical study of fossil records.