The larva of a Vietnamese moth has devised a unique form of transport -- constructing a leaf cone and thrashing about inside to make it jump, a study showed Wednesday.

Even more remarkably, the tiny caterpillar manages to steer its leafy vehicle in a clear direction along the forest floor -- but always away from the Sun, Canadian scientists wrote in the journal Biology Letters, published by Britain's Royal Society.

Human activity is almost certainly the cause of climate change and global sea levels could rise by several feet by the end of the century, according to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report leaked to media on Tuesday.

The draft summary of the report all but dismissed recent claims of a slowdown in the pace of warming, which has seized upon by climate-change sceptics.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is on the rise sharply, sparking alarm over the future of the world's biggest rainforest.

Between June and last August, Imazon, the first independent monitoring system for the area, detected a 100 percent surge in the clearing of land.

Jubilant conservationists expressed hope Tuesday for the survival of the critically-endangered giant ibis after a nest of the bird species was discovered in a previously unknown habitat in northeastern Cambodia.

Habitat loss and poaching has pushed the giant ibis to the edge of extinction, with around only 345 of the reclusive creatures -- distinctive for their bald heads and long beaks -- left anywhere in the world, 90 percent of them in Cambodia.

The earliest iron artefacts ever found -- funeral beads strung around bodies in a 5,000-year-old Egyptian cemetery -- were made from a meteorite, archaeologists said on Monday.

Hi-tech scanning of the beads, discovered by British archaeologists in the Lower Egypt village of el-Gerzeh in 1911, shows the metal came from a rock in outer space, they said.

China, the United States and Qatar were accused of environmental plunder on Tuesday as green activists marked "Earth Overshoot Day," the date at which mankind has exhausted a year's budget of natural resources.

"In just over eight months, we have used as much nature as our planet can regenerate this year," Global Footprint Network, an international thinktank which calculates the metric, said in a press release.

Puddles with extremely high radiation levels have been found near water storage tanks at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator said Tuesday, as it moved to contain the latest of several toxic water threats.

The radiation level, measured around 50 centimeters (20 inches) above the toxic water surface, was about 100 millisieverts per hour, Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO) said.

An Argentinian veterinarian has designed a cheap and simple device that could revolutionize cattle husbandry on the pampas by preventing pregnant cows from reaching the slaughterhouse.

Enrique Turin, a professor at the National University of Northwestern Buenos Aires, designed and is producing what he says is the world's first bovine intra-uterine device.

German power company RWE is shutting six domestic plants and rival E.ON is threatening to relocate to Turkey as the sector tots up the cost of the government's energy policy turnaround.

Ever since Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a phase-out of nuclear energy over the next decade and pledged to generate as much as 80 percent of the country's electricity from renewables by 2050, big question marks have been hanging over the future of coal and gas-fired plants in Germany.

The world's 136 largest coastal cities could risk combined annual losses of $1 trillion (750 billion euros) from floods by 2050 unless they drastically raise their defenses, a study warned Sunday.

Current losses are about $6 billion per year, with four cities -- Miami, New York and New Orleans in the United States and Guangzhou in China -- incurring 43 percent of the costs, according to a report in the journal Nature Climate Change.