Australia Saturday announced plans to drill a 2,000 year-old ice core in the heart of Antarctica in a bid to retrieve a frozen record of how the planet has evolved and what might be in store.

The Aurora Basin North project involves scientists from Australia, France, Denmark and the United States who hope it will also advance the search for the scientific "holy grail" of the million-year-old ice core.

To millions of people, the Christmas tree is a cheerful sight. To scientists who decipher the DNA codes of plants and animals, it's a monster.

We're talking about the conifer, the term for cone-bearing trees like the spruce, fir, pine, cypress and cedar. Apart from their holiday popularity, they play big roles in the lumber industry and in healthy forest ecosystems.

Nearly 4 out of 5 Americans now think temperatures are rising and that global warming will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it, a new Associated Press-GfK poll finds.

Belief and worry about climate change are inching up among Americans in general, but concern is growing faster among people who don't often trust scientists on the environment. In follow-up interviews, some of those doubters said they believe their own eyes as they've watched thermometers rise, New York City subway tunnels flood, polar ice melt and Midwestern farm fields dry up.

N. Joseph Woodland, inventor of the now ubiquitous bar code that revolutionized retail, has died at the age of 91, US media reported Friday.

Woodland came up with the zebra-like pattern used to store information as he drew lines in the sand on a Miami beach 64 years ago, his daughter, Susan Woodland, told the Record, a New Jersey newspaper.

NASA will smash two tiny probes into the Moon on Monday after they spent months gathering data from orbit miles above the lunar surface, the U.S. space agency said Thursday.

"We're not expecting a big smash, a big explosion," said project manager David Lehman of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Their fuel tank will be empty and they are the size of a washing machine."

Organisms long thought to have been the ancestors of early marine creatures may in fact have lived on land, said a fossil study Wednesday that may prompt an overhaul of the tree of animal life.

If correct, the finding could challenge the commonly held theory that life had thrived in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years before spreading to land.

The Hubble Space Telescope is giving scientists a look at the oldest galaxies ever seen, dating back some 13.3 billion years -- providing a glimpse into how the cosmos must have looked right after the Big Bang.

NASA scientists announced Wednesday that Hubble has uncovered seven never-before-seen primitive galaxies dating back to when the universe was less than four percent of its current age.

The future of nuclear power in Fukushima-scarred Japan has emerged as a major campaign issue for the first time in weekend polls, but experts warn little thought has gone into how to replace atomic energy.

Environmental issues have rarely topped the agenda in Japanese elections, which tend to focus on the country's moribund economy and a policy drift fuelled by the passage of seven prime ministers in six years.

Organisms long thought to have been the ancestors of early marine creatures may in fact have lived on land, said a fossil study Wednesday that may prompt an overhaul of the tree of animal life.

If correct, the finding could challenge the commonly held theory that life had thrived in the oceans for hundreds of millions of years before spreading to land.

Poaching and illegal trade in protected species like elephants, rhinos and tigers has boomed into a $19-billion-a-year industry that threatens security and stability in many countries, the World Wildlife Fund warned Wednesday.

"Besides driving many endangered species towards extinction, illegal wildlife trade strengthens criminal networks (and) undermines national security," the WWF said in a statement.