When the tiny desert nation ofQatar was chosen to host the latest round of United Nations climate change negotiations, environmentalists were stunned.

Talks were already in trouble, and now the high-level discussions were moving to a member of OPEC that had shown little interest in climate change and appointed a former oil minister to lead the negotiations, which start Monday. The country's economic boom, driven by vast oil and gas reserves, has led to free electricity for citizens and an abundance of gas-guzzling SUVs in the capital, Doha. It has also made Qatar the world's highest per capita carbon dioxide emitter.

A reactor at a Swiss nuclear plant shut down automatically Wednesday due to a defect, the operator said, stressing that the procedure had been completely safe.

"Block 2 of the Beznau nuclear power plant shut down automatically," operator Axpo said in a statement.

When Lonesome George, the last Pinta Island giant tortoise, died in June in the Galapagos, the world mourned the demise of a species. A report Wednesday, however, says that George was not lonely after all.

There are at least 17 tortoises on the Galapagos Islands that have similar genetic traits to George, including some that may be from his same genus, the Galapagos National Park said in a statement.

Anti-whaling activists said Thursday there would be demonstrations in Tokyo and eight other cities around the world this weekend against Japan's hunt.

Protesters are expected to gather in the Japanese capital to call for an end to the annual state-sponsored whaling mission to the Southern Ocean, due to start in the next few weeks, and to the capture and slaughter of dolphins in the town of Taiji.

South Korea plans to go ahead with a delayed rocket launch on Thursday next week in its third bid in four years to put a satellite into orbit, officials said.

If all goes as scheduled, the 140-tonne rocket will lift off between 4:00-6:55pm (0700-0955 GMT) from the Naro Space Center on the south coast, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology said.

A South Pacific island identified on Google Earth and world maps does not exist, according to Australian scientists who went searching for the mystery landmass during a geological expedition.

The sizeable phantom island in the Coral Sea is shown as Sandy Island on Google Earth and Google maps and is supposedly midway between Australia and the French-governed New Caledonia.

Scientists hoping to detect dark matter deep in a former South Dakota gold mine have taken the last major step before flipping the switch on their delicate experiment and say they may be ready to begin collecting data as early as February.

What's regarded as the world's most sensitive dark matter detector was lowered earlier this month into a 70,000-gallon (264,971 liter) water tank nearly a mile (1.6 kilometers) beneath the earth's surface, shrouding it in enough insulation to hopefully isolate dark matter from the cosmic radiation that makes it impossible to detect above ground.

Wormholes reproduced in ancient wood-printed illustrations have revealed the odyssey of European beetles, set against a backdrop of climate change and globalization.

In an unusual study released Wednesday, biologist Blair Hedges at Penn State University in Pennsylvania looked at art printed with carved blocks of wood, a technique that illustrated millions of books before mechanized printing.

A joint European-Russian plan for an unmanned mission to look for signs of life on Mars cleared a hurdle at a European Space Agency (ESA) budget meeting in Naples on Wednesday, delegates said.

But a scheme to send a European lander to the Moon made no headway given ESA's money crunch, and an early-stage proposal to join China in a space weather forecasting system was also nixed, they said.

A New Zealand volcano used as a backdrop to "The Lord of the Rings" films erupted on Wednesday, spewing a column of ash three kilometers (1.9 miles) above the North Island, scientists said.

Vulcanologists said Mount Tongariro rumbled to life at 1:25 pm (0025 GMT), in a five-minute burst that briefly closed roads, put aviation authorities on high alert and sent nearby hikers scrambling for safety.