California firefighters were able to beat back a massive wildfire outside Los Angeles after a tropical storm brought rains and cooler temperatures, US authorities said on Saturday.

Renagi Ravu was meeting with two colleagues at his home in the Papua New Guinea highlands Sunday morning when a huge magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck.

Even if the world somehow manages to limit future warming to the strictest international temperature goal, four Earth-changing climate "tipping points" are still likely to be triggered with a lot more looming as the planet heats more after that, a new study said.

A skeleton discovered in a remote corner of Borneo rewrites the history of ancient medicine and proves amputation surgery was successfully carried out about 31,000 years ago, scientists said Wednesday.

Through giant lobes of gamma radiation, an international team of researchers have found a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way filled with dark matter, but whose emissions are more likely the result of millisecond pulsars blasting out cosmic particles, reports a new study in Nature Astronomy.