No one knows how they got there. But an invasion of African giant snails has southern Florida in a panic over potential crop damage, disease and general yuckiness surrounding the slimy gastropods.

The U.S. and Florida departments of agriculture have mobilized 34 agents to battle the infestation and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service is heading up an investigation into how the mollusks -- which can be up to 20 centimeters (eight inches) long -- arrived.

Astronomers in Chile said this week they had created the world's largest virtual optical telescope by using a special technique to combine images from the four most powerful devices as if they were a single device.

"This weekend we managed to finish the process (of merging the images) after almost a year," said Jean-Philippe Berger, a scientist at the European Southern Observatory which operates the Very Large Telescope array (VLT) in Chile's high northern desert

If scientists find microbes in a frigid lake two miles beneath the thick ice of Antarctica, it will illustrate once again that somehow life finds a way to survive in the strangest and harshest places.

And it will offer hope that life exists beyond Earth.

A white lion slips on ice while playing with a plastic drum like a kitten with a ball of yarn, but the big cat quickly regains its footing.

The African carnivore has adapted well to Canada's cold winters.

Thousands of small "pyramids" are being planted off the Philippines' famous Boracay resort island in an effort to bring its nearly destroyed coral reefs back to life, an environment group said Thursday.

Over 300 of the structures were planted this week off Boracay's coast and eventually about 5,000 will be placed in the sea, according to Sangkalikasan (Nature) which is behind the effort.

Himalayan glaciers and ice caps that supply water to more than a billion people in Asia are losing mass up to 10 times less quickly than once feared, reports a study published Thursday.

Based on an improved analysis of satellite data from 2003 to 2010, the findings offer a reprieve for a region already feeling the impacts of global warming.

Sheep are among the most genetically diverse domesticated animals, and further breeding could yield more meat and wool, according to a new U.S. study.

The study, published Tuesday in the online journal PLoS Biology, maps out the ancestry of sheep going back 11,000 years, to the origins of animal husbandry, and shows that there may still be room for improvement.

The steady drone of motors along busy commercial shipping lanes not only alters whale behavior but can affect the giant sea mammals physically by causing chronic stress, a study published Wednesday has reported for the first time.

The findings were made possible, researchers said, by an event that at first glance seems far removed from the plight of cetaceans: the attacks on New York's Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.

One of the world's smallest primates, the Philippine tarsier, communicates in a range of ultrasound inaudible to predator and prey alike, according to a study published Wednesday.

No bigger than a man's hand, Tarsius syrichta can hear and emit sounds at a frequency that effectively gives it a private channel for issuing warnings or ferreting out crickets for a nighttime snack, the study found.

The call of a Jurassic-era cricket was simple, pure and capable of traveling long distances in the night, said scientists who reconstructed the creature's love song from a 165 million year old fossil.

British scientists based their work out Monday on an extremely well preserved fossil of a katydid, or bush cricket, from China named Archaboilus musicus. The cricket lived in an era when dinosaurs roamed the earth.