The team made nanosheets of boron nitride, also called white graphene, that were able to soak up a wide range of spilt oils, chemical solvents and dyes such as those discharged by the textile, paper and tannery industries.

Highly porous, the sheets have a high surface area, can float on water and are water-repellent, the team from France and Australia wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

Physicists announced a breakthrough Tuesday in their quest to answer one of science's great questions: do the same laws of gravity apply to antimatter -- the obscure counterpart of matter as we know it?

Though antimatter is thought to have existed in equal quantities to matter at the moment of the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, it is rare today and scientists who wish to study antimatter particles have to manufacture them.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has captured stunning views of a monster hurricane at Saturn's North Pole.

The eye of the cyclone is an enormous 1,250 miles (2,010 kilometers) across. That's 20 times larger than the typical eye of a hurricane here on Earth. And it's spinning super-fast. Clouds at the outer edge of the storm are whipping around at 330 mph (531 kph).

The European Union plans to restrict the use of three pesticides to better protect dwindling bee populations.

The announcement Monday was cheered by environmentalists, disappointed chemical companies and came after the bloc's 27 nations failed to agree on a common stand.

Virgin Galactic's passenger spaceplane, which is designed to take tourists to the edge of space, flew its first rocket-powered test flight Monday, breaking the sound barrier at high altitude.

SpaceShipTwo ignited its engine after being released by WhiteKnightTwo, a plane that carried it to 47,000 feet (14,000 meters) above California's Mojave desert, British billionaire Richard Branson's firm said in a statement.

The U.N.'s climate chief called for urgency Monday as she opened a new round of global talks amid warnings that Earth-warming carbon dioxide levels were approaching a symbolic threshold never seen in human history.

Data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii have shown the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to be at 399.72 parts per million (ppm), Christiana Figueres told climate negotiators in Bonn.

Conservationists accused Australia of failing to protect the Great Barrier Reef from massive industrial development as they launched a multi-million dollar campaign to drum up awareness.

The move follows UNESCO demanding decisive action to protect the world's largest coral reef from a gas and mining boom and increasing coastal development, or risk the embarrassment of seeing it put on its danger list.

Russian astronauts will take an unlit Olympic torch on a space walk ahead of the country's hosting of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the deputy head of the Russian space agency said on Sunday.

"It will not be a copy but exactly the same as the torch at the Olympics," deputy head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, Vitaly Davydov, told the Interfax news agency.

Several dozen Humboldt penguins sun themselves along the coast of an islet in central Chile where the majestic birds coming here to nest once numbered in the thousands.

Humboldt penguins -- which nest only in parts of Chile and Peru -- over the years have become decimated by human encroachment, rat infestations and unforgiving weather currents carried by unusually warm El Nino ocean temperatures, naturalists said.

China is rapidly assuming a global leadership role on climate change alongside the United States, a new study said Monday, but it warned greenhouse gas emissions worldwide continue to rise strongly.

The report by the independent Australian-based Climate Commission, "The Critical Decade: International Action on Climate Change" presents an overview of action in the last nine months.