On the road to Walgett a sign welcomes visitors: "Farming is not a way of life, it keeps everyone alive." But with drought taking a heavy toll on the region, farming has become a battle for survival.

The Australian agricultural town -- which takes its name from the Aboriginal word meaning the meeting of two rivers -- is in the grip of the worst drought in a century, with disillusioned farmers battling to stay afloat.

Antarctica's Ross Sea has been a rare safe haven for emperor penguins for thousands of years, even when temperatures were too harsh for their liking, a study released Monday suggests.

Researchers looking at how climatic changes have affected the highly cold-adapted penguin -- the tallest and heaviest of all penguin species -- over the last 30,000 years suggest that only three populations survived the last ice age.

A rare white elephant has been captured in Myanmar, state media said Monday, a creature traditionally seen as a sign of political good fortune in a country edging towards breakthrough national elections.

The pink-tinged pachyderm, which was caught in a forest reserve in the Irrawaddy Delta area of Pathein, is the ninth white elephant to be held in captivity in the former junta-run country, according to a report in the Global New Light of Myanmar. 

A solar-powered plane made a third successful test flight in the United Arab Emirates on Monday ahead of a planned round-the-world tour to promote alternative energy.

Organizers hope that Solar Impulse 2 may head off around the globe as early as Saturday but caution that the launch is dependent on the weather, even in the relatively cloudless Gulf.

China's population of wild giant pandas jumped nearly 17 percent over a decade -- state media reported, citing an official survey -- with conservation measures credited as being behind the increase.

The investigation by the State Forestry Administration (SFA) found that by the end of 2013 China had 1,864 giant pandas alive in the wild, marking an increase of 268 individuals, or 16.8 percent, the official Xinhua news agency reported Saturday.

A new instrument on Europe's Very Large Telescope (VLT) has produced the most detailed 3-D view yet of the deep Universe, discovering 26 distant galaxies in just 27 hours of scanning, its operators said Friday.

MUSE, for Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, captures high-resolution images of deep space, and breaks the light observed from distant objects down into its component colors in order to study the composition, distance and movement of galaxies.

American astronauts will venture back out for a spacewalk this weekend, despite a helmet water leak on their previous trip outside the International Space Station.

NASA on Friday cleared astronaut Terry Virts' spacesuit for the last of three spacewalks to install cable. Mission managers believe they understand the quirks with this older suit and insist it is safe to use for Sunday's spacewalk.

Wild giant pandas in China are doing well.

The latest census by China's State Forestry Administration shows the panda population has grown by 268 to a total of 1,864 since the last survey ending in 2003.

From the ground in this extreme northern part of Antarctica, spectacularly white and blinding ice seems to extend forever. What can't be seen is the battle raging underfoot to re-shape Earth.

Water is eating away at the Antarctic ice, melting it where it hits the oceans. As the ice sheets slowly thaw, water pours into the sea — 130 billion tons of ice (118 billion metric tons) per year for the past decade, according to NASA satellite calculations. That's the weight of more than 356,000 Empire State Buildings, enough ice melt to fill more than 1.3 million Olympic swimming pools. And the melting is accelerating.

An "unprecedented" thousands of dead fish washed up in Rio's heavily polluted Guanabara Bay this week, deepening fears for the health of competitors at the 2016 Olympics and alarming fishermen.

Detritus including dead animals, television sets, sofas and shoes have all been found in the waters, which will host sailing competitions at next year's Rio games.