Ma Wangzhen walks in the desert that threatens to engulf her onion farm on the edge of the ancient Chinese city of Dunhuang in China's northwest Gansu province, on October 25, 2007. Loss of land …more

Loss of land through desertification and drought costs up to five percent of world agricultural gross domestic product (AGDP), or some $450 billion (340 billion euros), every year, said a study presented at a U.N. conference Tuesday.

Fledglings of a southern African bird species threaten suicide to blackmail their parents into bringing them more food, scientists said Wednesday.

When hungry, pied babbler fledglings flutter from the nest to the ground, where predators roam, and start screeching to highlight their plight, said a study published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

It's been frozen, baked, suffocated and sprayed with toxins... and each time the bedbug bounces back, leaving tiny bite marks on legs or arms where it takes a blood meal.

But thanks to an unusual combination of Balkan folklore and nanoscale science, the pesky critter may have met its match.

Flights will become bumpier as global warming destabilises air currents at altitudes used by commercial airliners, climate scientists warned Monday.

Already, atmospheric turbulence injures hundreds of airline passengers each year, sometimes fatally, damaging aircraft and costing the industry an estimated $150 million (115 million euros), scientists said.

Which is more important, pandas or pinot?

Researchers say that is a question conservationists and wine-growers will have to answer in the coming years as climate change sparks a hunt for cooler places to grow wine grapes, even if those places are home to sensitive animal populations.

The eternal question of whether penis size matters to women has been probed by a team of international scientists who reported on Monday that yes, ladies do find larger men more attractive.

What's more, prehistoric women who could see the sex organs of their scantily clad male counterparts may have helped influence the evolution of larger genitals in men by choosing to mate with partners who were bigger.

The big rigs rattling past smokestacks sure don't make this Chicago roadway look like the greenest street in America.

But their tires roll over smog-eating pavement, the streetlights run on solar and wind power, the sidewalks were made with recycled concrete, and shrub-filled "bioswales" keep storm water out of overtaxed sewers.

The U.S. space agency is planning for a robotic spaceship to capture a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator disclosed Friday.

The plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth, Sen. Bill Nelson said.

Nancy Bertler and her team took a freezer to the coldest place on Earth, endured weeks of primitive living and risked spending the winter in Antarctic darkness, to go get ice — ice that records our climate's past and could point to its future.

They drilled out hundreds of ice cores, each slightly longer and wider than a baseball bat, from the half-mile-thick ice covering Antarctica's Roosevelt Island. The cores, which may total 150,000 years of snowfall, almost didn't survive the boat ride to New Zealand because of a power outage.

Automatic spending cuts have hit America's science and research sectors especially hard, according to experts, who warn of potentially dire implications for the nation's overall competitiveness.

As the "sequester," a package of spending cuts imposed last month, begins to pinch, many research projects will be slowed or scuttled, from cancer therapies to efforts to convert medical breakthroughs into marketable therapies.