Thousands of solar panels glint in the sun, but the prized farmland beneath lies barren. While the Italian island of Sardinia revels in a renewable energy boom, the long arm of organised crime risks sullying its clean power ambitions.

Famed for its lush plains and emerald waters but racked by poverty and unemployment, Sardinia has jumped at the chance to boost the economy by converting its long months of sunshine into green energy.

Bangladesh has only about 100 tigers living in the world's largest mangrove forest, far fewer of the endangered animals than previously thought, following a recent survey, a top forestry official said Monday.

Some 440 tigers were recorded during the previous census conducted in 2004 in the World Heritage-listed Sundarbans, one of the world's last remaining habitats for the big cats. 

An underwater volcano north of Grenada is showing a decline in seismic activity, authorities on the eastern Caribbean island said Saturday.

Grenada's National Disaster Management Agency said it expects to lower the alert level from orange to yellow if that pattern continues.

Pluto is hazier than scientists expected and appears to be covered with flowing ice.

The team responsible for the New Horizons flyby of Pluto last week released new pictures Friday of the previously unexplored world on the edge of the solar system.

The deep oceans span more than half the globe and their frigid depths have long been known to contain vast, untapped deposits of prized minerals. These treasures of the abyss, however, have always been out of reach to miners.

But now, the era of deep seabed mining appears to be dawning fueled by technological advances in robotics and dwindling land-based deposits. Rising demand for copper, cobalt, gold and the rare-earth elements vital in manufacturing smartphones and other high-tech products is causing a prospecting rush to the dark seafloor thousands of meters (yards) beneath the waves.

A powerful typhoon which lashed Japan last week has killed more than 11,000 farmed bluefin tuna, costing over $10 million in damage, local media said Saturday.

Typhoon Nangka made landfall in southwestern Japan on the night of July 16 and slowly moved northward before turning into a tropical depression.

The United Arab Emirates, one of the world's most arid countries, is striving to capture every drop of rain it can wring from the clouds that pass over the desert nation.

In the blazing sunshine at Al-Ain airport, a twin-propeller Beechcraft stands ready to fly into action at a moment's notice on a cloud-seeding mission.

NASA's discovery of Earth-like exoplanet Kepler-452b, nicknamed "Earth 2.0", has social media buzzing about the chances of finding a faraway world, possibly with alien life or key resources such as water.

Science or fiction? The experts respond.

Almost 350 years ago, Dutch inventor and scientist Christiaan Huygens observed that two pendulum clocks hanging from a wall would synchronize their swing over time.

What causes the phenomenon has led to much scientific head-scratching over the centuries, but no consensus to date. 

Astronomers hunting for another Earth have found the closest match yet, a potentially rocky planet circling its star at the same distance as our home orbits the Sun, NASA said Thursday.

Named Kepler 452b, the planet is about 60 percent larger than Earth. It could have active volcanoes, oceans, sunshine like ours, twice as much gravity and a year that lasts 385 days, scientists said.