Staple food prices may double within the next two decades due to climate change and an increase in extreme weather including droughts and hurricanes, the anti-poverty group Oxfam said Wednesday.

Oxfam warned current climate change research isn't taking into account extreme weather events, which it warned could also temporarily send up prices by a similar amount.

Natto, the Japanese breakfast dish of fermented soybeans, has a smell likened to sweaty feet but researchers have come up with an unlikely way of making it less whiffy -- using bacteria from Chinese dust clouds.

Microscopic organisms found in the yellow fug that drifts over from China are almost identical to the reagent usually added to the beans to start the decomposition process, said Teruya Maki, an assistant professor at Kanazawa University.

NASA's Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is nearing the edge of the solar system and may already be "dancing on the edge" of outer space, the scientists behind the project said Tuesday.

In a lecture marking the approaching 35th anniversary of the Voyager project, Ed Stone said it could be "days, months or years" before it finally breaks into interstellar space.

A memorial service for Neil Armstrong, the U.S. astronaut who became the first human being to set foot on the moon, will be held in the U.S. capital Washington on September 13, NASA said Tuesday.

NASA chief Charles Bolden, present and former astronauts and other dignitaries are expected to attend the ceremony at the Washington National Cathedral in honor of Armstrong, who died on August 25 at the age of 82.

The 13th tropical depression of the Atlantic hurricane season formed far out in the ocean Monday and was posing no immediate threat to land.

The depression was located 1,350 miles northwest of the Cape Verde Islands on Monday afternoon and had maximum sustained winds of 35 mph, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. It was creeping northwest at 3 mph and was expected to continue in a northwesterly direction.

A huge Dutch super-trawler was Tuesday given the go-ahead to fish in Australian waters but with tough conditions to minimize by-catch such as dolphins, seals and sea lions.

The 9,500-tonne FV Margiris repelled Greenpeace protesters to dock at Port Lincoln in South Australia last Thursday for re-flagging as an Australian vessel before its proposed deployment to Tasmania for bait-fishing.

Peruvian authorities say wastewater laced with heavy metals from a major zinc mine has spilled into a tributary of the Amazon, contaminating at least six miles of the waterway.

Pasco regional mining environmental engineer Juan Escalante tells The Associated Press that an unknown quantity of toxic wastewater from the Atacocha mine escaped from a sedimentation well Wednesday into the Huallaga River. The mine is owned by the Brazilian company Votorantim.

U.S. scientists are to investigate what led 22 whales to beach themselves in Florida -- killing 17 of them -- one of three such incidents in North America over the weekend.

The dead whales will be "dispersed at different labs across Florida for necropsy," or animal autopsies, Blair Mase, regional stranding coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told Agence France Presse on Sunday.

A new underwater explorer hit the seas this summer, armed with cameras, strobes and sonar and charged with being a protector of sorts to a half-billion dollar resource — the Atlantic scallop catch.

The stainless steel Seahorse, which gets its nickname from its s-shaped silhouette, traces its roots to a conversation a decade ago between a biologist and a fisherman who was seeking a better way to track the scallop population.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has fired the chief of a key state-run aerospace bureau following several launch failures, the Kremlin said Monday.

The head of the Khrunichev space center, Vladimir Nesterov, has been relieved of his duties, said a decree dated August 31 and published on the Kremlin website Monday.