A global warming "pause" over the past decade may invalidate the harshest climate change predictions for the next 50 to 100 years, a study said Sunday -- though levels remain in the danger zone.

Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, an international team of climate scientists said a slower rate of warming increase observed from 2000 to 2009 suggested a "lower range of values" to be taken into account by policy makers.

Giant leatherback turtles, some weighing half as much as a small car, drag themselves out of the ocean and up the sloping shore on the northeastern coast of Trinidad while villagers await wearing dimmed headlamps in the dark. Their black carapaces glistening, the turtles inch along the moonlit beach, using their powerful front flippers to move their bulky frames onto the sand.

In years past, poachers from Grande Riviere and nearby towns would ransack the turtles' buried eggs and hack the critically threatened reptiles to death with machetes to sell their meat in the market. Now, the turtles are the focus of a thriving tourist trade, with people so devoted to them that they shoo birds away when the turtles first start out as tiny hatchlings scurrying to sea.

Hong Kong saw its first electric taxis hit the streets on Saturday in a step towards reducing the city's high levels of roadside pollution.

The 45 bright red cars were launched by Chinese electric vehicle producer BYD, which is partly backed by U.S. investment titan Warren Buffett.

Scientists have identified nanostructures in the ultra-black skin markings of an African viper which they said Thursday could inspire the quest to create the ultimate light-absorbing material.

The West African Gaboon viper, one of the largest in Africa and a master of camouflage, has dark spots in the geometrical pattern of its skin that are deep, velvety black and reflect very little light.

Russian explorers headed home Thursday after proving it is possible to drive from Russia to Canada across the North Pole, in buses with bloated tires over drifting ice, using a pickaxe to clear the way.

Their two-and-a-half-month hitherto untried odyssey aimed to road test the hand-crafted vehicles on ice and water, conduct a few scientific experiments, and bring together a band of adventurers drawn to the vast and pristine Arctic, expedition leader Vassili Ielaguine said during a stopover in Ottawa.

Water from the world's shrinking glaciers was responsible for almost a third of the rise in sea levels between 2003 and 2009, new research showed Thursday.

A study published in the journal Science revealed that researchers had analyzed data gleaned from two NASA satellites as well as traditional ground measurements from glaciers around the world.

A thud, dirt in the window of his capsule and the fresh smell of spring on the Kazakh steppe: Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recalled Thursday his safe return from a five-month mission to space.

"We hit the Earth just like a car crash," Hadfield told a webcast news conference from NASA headquarters in Houston, Texas, where he has been undergoing tests and readapting to gravity since Tuesday's landing.

NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft appears to be hobbled by a faulty wheel and may be near the end of its four-year mission, space agency scientists said Wednesday.

Kepler, a $600 million mission, was launched in 2009 on a search for other planets. So far, it has found 2,700 candidates, including a handful that may be habitable worlds, not too hot and not too cold.

A review of thousands of studies published over 21 years found "overwhelming" and growing consensus among scientists that humans are mostly to blame for global warming, its authors said Thursday.

This contradicts a widely held view that scientists are deeply divided on the topic -- a misconception that complicates efforts to win public backing for climate policy, the authors wrote in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Australia said it was pushing for a ban Thursday of any commercial use of a pioneering technique to reduce the impacts of climate change by "fertilizing" the world's oceans with iron, warning of significant risks.

Environment Minister Tony Burke said Australia had worked with Nigeria and South Korea on an amendment to the London Protocol governing waste dumping at sea which would prohibit commercial fertilization activities.