SYDNEY - AUSTRALIA'S iconic koala will become extinct in some areas of the country if the federal government does not take urgent action, conservationists said on Thursday.

A group of Australian scientists will meet with government officials in Canberra on Friday in a bid to hammer out a national koala conservation strategy to keep key populations of the animals from dying out.

BOSTON - DOCTORS in St Louis said they have successfully transplanted a full ovary from a volunteer, allowing her infertile twin sister to give birth to a healthy baby girl on Nov 11.

It is the first time an entire ovary has been transplanted and resulted in a live birth, the researchers said. Writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, they said the method may offer a way to preserve fertility for cancer patients or for women who want to wait until they are older to start families.

TOKYO - A JAPANESE research team said on Thursday it had created a technology that could eventually display on a computer screen what people have on their minds, such as dreams.

Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories succeeded in processing and displaying images directly from the human brain, they said in a study unveiled ahead of publication in the US magazine Neuron.