The last total lunar eclipse of the year is Saturday. And there won't be another one for three years.

Viewers in the western half of the United States will have the best views Saturday well before dawn. The farther west the better.

Crows have a long-term memory so good that they can recall colors for at least a year, a Japanese study has shown.

Birds that had identified which of two containers held food by the color of its lid were still able to perform the task 12 months later, said Shoei Sugita, a professor of animal morphology at Utsunomiya University.

Feeding dairy cows the stems, seeds and skins from wine grapes boosts milk production and dramatically cuts the animal's methane emissions, Australian researched published Thursday shows.

Scientists found that supplementing the cows' feed with grape marc -- the leftover material from wine-making -- reduced cow emissions by 20 percent and increased milk production by five percent.

With the constant churn of freighter propellers, the percussive thump of oil and gas exploration and the underwater din of military testing, ocean noise levels have become unbearable for some sea mammals.

Contrary to the image of a distant and silent world under the sea, underwater sound intensity has on average soared 20 decibels over the past 50 years, with devastating consequences for wildlife.

After a series of delays and billions spent over budget, the potent James Webb Space Telescope is on track to launch in 2018 at a total project cost of $8.8 billion, NASA vowed on Tuesday.

The project, which aims to build the world's most powerful telescope, 100 times more sensitive than the Hubble space telescope, has been riddled by poor management and cost overruns.

Expanding palm-oil plantations in Malaysian Borneo are rapidly eating into the habitat of the rare proboscis monkey and causing its numbers to decline sharply, officials warned Wednesday.

The reddish-brown primate, which is named for its distinctive large and fleshy nose, is found only on Borneo, a large island divided up between Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei.

A newly discovered planet is eerily similar to Earth and is sitting outside Earth's solar system in what seems to be the ideal place for life, except for one hitch. It is a bit too big.

The planet is smack in the middle of what astronomers call the Goldilocks zone, that hard to find place that is not too hot, not too cold, where water, which is essential for life, does not freeze or boil. And it has a shopping mall-like surface temperature of near 72 degrees, scientists say.

Fourteen Asiatic black bears have been rescued from a bear bile farm in Vietnam after their owner decided to renounce the illegal trade, an animal protection group said Tuesday.

The animals, known as moon bears after the distinctive yellow crescent moon-shaped mark on their chests, were given to Animals Asia by bear farm owner Nguyen Ngoc Tien, the group said in a Tuesday statement.

Japan's whaling fleet left port Tuesday for the country's annual hunt in Antarctica, press pictures showed, with security measures beefed up amid simmering international protests.

Three ships, led by the 720-tonne Yushin Maru, set sail from Shimonoseki in western Japan on a mission officially said to be for "scientific research", according to local media reports.

More than three decades after launching, NASA's workhorse spacecraft is inching closer to leaving the solar system behind.

Currently 11 billion miles away from the sun, Voyager 1 has been exploring the fringes of the solar system since 2004. Scientists said Monday the spacecraft has entered a new region in the solar system that they have dubbed the "stagnation zone."