There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space.

There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?

Bereft of his ability to fly and with nowhere to go, a courageous bat climbed aboard our Discovery with stars in his weak little eyes. The launch commenced, and Spacebat trembled as his frail mammalian body was gently pushed skyward.

After a rocky start, it'll be starting back up in June, and guess who'll be throwing the switch? No, not someone who has anything to do with the thing.

Snow covered the Jebel Jais area for only the second time in recorded history yesterday

There are 256 rules you can concoct to play this simple game. Most will create a boring or repetitive pattern. But at least one rule will cause the page to explode into complex, ever-shifting patterns.

a University of Utah student just as surely monkey-wrenched a federal oil- and gas-lease sale Friday, ensuring that thousands of acres near two southern Utah national parks won't be opened to drilling anytime soon.

A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.

"The clinical onset of autism appears to be preceded by 2 phases of brain growth abnormality: a reduced head size at birth and a sudden and excessive increase in head size between 1 to 2 months and 6 to 14 months," the scientists wrote.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

Within a week, the average global surface temperature would drop below 0°F. In a year, it would dip to –100°.

But you have to understand — it's not stupidity or insanity or even pride that keeps most people in their homes during a storm: It's hope.

The okapi—a secretive rain forest animal so elusive it has been compared to the unicorn—has been photographed for the first time in the wild, scientists with the Zoological Society of London reported yesterday.

A tiny, six-legged critter that can suspend all biological activity in extreme environments survived a journey to space that would have instantly killed any human and most other life forms.

For decades, people referred to the non-coding bits of DNA between genes as junk DNA. Then, in the eighties scientists discovered that some of that junk DNA served an important purpose.

But there is also a small coterie of serious scientists interested in the possibility—as they see it, the likelihood—that somewhere in the deep woods of North America enormous ape-men really are alive and well and just barely eluding detection.

American ingenuity doesn't get much more classic.

Images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the Perseus cluster of stars have helped scientists to solve a 100 million-year-old mystery of how giant structures in deep space are prevented from disintegrating.

While yachts and jets marked the status of last century's super rich, today the stylish accessory for millionaires is their very own ecosystem.

A new color-coded image represents the first visual evidence of the existence of dark energy, a mysterious force that astronomers think is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine.

Regulations will soon ban the movement of wood in and out of the Ottawa area, following the local discovery of a beetle from Asia that feasts on and kills ash trees.

Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell returned from his mission to the moon a changed man. He has spent the last 35 years trying to use the tools of science to figure out what happened.

The dead satellites aren't the main problem. It's the ones that have blown up and the fragments of rocket bodies that booted them into orbit.

The discovery of a missing link in the evolution of bizarre flatfisheseach of which has both eyes on the same side of its headcould give intelligent design advocates a sinking feeling.

With two currently functioning orbiters, and five more missions planned in the next year, Earth's Moon may soon have seven active probes operated by five nations, with even more coming soon.

Clouds fill the skies above us and are part of our every day lives, often going unnoticed. However, there are some clouds that are so rare that you will be very lucky to see them in your lifetime.

Water is having a significant impact on many people's lives around the world right now.

Instead of sending $400 billion each year to countries such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, we could spend it on electric car production in the U.S., Mexico, and China. At current oil prices, it wouldn't cost us a dime extra to stop importing and burning oil for passenger cars.

Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

Wernher von Braun is an iconic figure of the 20th century, someone who built deadly missiles for Adolf Hitler and the Saturn V rockets that sent Americans to the Moon. Michael J.

The discovery could be one of several factors in the "colony collapse disorder" that is wiping out honey bees around the world.

With that thought in mind, and the coming climate change, what cities are most likely to be abandoned and raising questions?

During the storm, it soon became clear, that this one was NOT one of the usual storms with "only" 10 meter waves! No,- on the "Stolt Surf" we experienced to our astonishment, that when the big waves came crashing towards us, we had to look UP in order to see the top of the waves …

Gamma-Ray Bursts are the most powerful bangs in the cosmos. They occur in far-off galaxies and so are usually faint.

But, most importantly, he's working to build in code that can force the little bugs into becoming solar-powered crude oil factories.

1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.

A Neanderthal-eat-Neanderthal world may have spread a mad cow-like disease that weakened and reduced populations of the large Eurasian human, thereby contributing to its extinction, according to a new theory based on cannibalism that took place in more recent history.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.

Basically, Dan Wertheimer, a radio astronomer who is affiliated with SETI, detected a pulse from space. The source is certainly extragalactic, and is most likely some sort of natural event. It's unclear exactly what kind of event, but there is a long list of things it could be.

Fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate change evangelism, Al Gore is apparently considering an invitation from a prominent environmental group to engage in civil disobedience against the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

The wildebeest were attempting to ford Kenya's Mara River at an incredibly dangerous point. They did not realize how steep the banks were until it was far too late… The first few animals failed to cross, while others continued to stampede behind.

George Bush's top scientific advisor has delivered the strongest statement yet from within the US administration that greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity are to blame for climate change.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) security think-tank said global warming would hit crop yields and water availability everywhere, causing great human suffering and leading to regional strife.

Reliable household products get the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. Safe electronics earn Underwriters Laboratories' UL mark.

And the driving force behind the next boom (and bust) cycle? Green energy, green power, a move away from dependence on petroleum, of course. The reason? Well, many.

People are less alike than scientists had thought when it comes to the billions of building blocks that make up each individual's DNA, according to a new analysis.

Canada's position "really is scary in terms of what the outcome will be for after 2012," Bennet said.

China, the world's second-biggest energy consumer, has ``very serious'' pollution problems and must strengthen the enforcement of environmental regulations, Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan told government officials.

Fires of unprecedented ferocity are sweeping around the world, fuelled by global warming and misguided environmentalism. Dubbed "megafires", they rage over thousands of miles at 1,000C and create their own weather, even triggering tornadoes.

Greece's huge forest fires have been blamed by some on global warming, but satellite images of smoke plumes drifting as far as Africa prompt the question: are forests a major source of greenhouse gas?

Fighting global warming takes some personal restraint. It means saving energy by cutting back on miles driven or turning down the air conditioner a couple of degrees. But it doesn't require drastically altering a person's lifestyle, according to some climate experts.

The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday.

Following the rule requires understanding its intricacies. "I would never eat a pickle," says Anaiah Grissom, 9, "not even after one second." She also would not eat a hot dog, a burger or a piece of broccoli, because those get dirty really fast.

Executive producer Al Jean, the show's head writer and a Harvard mathematics graduate, talks to Nature about how to get a laugh out of Euler's formula.

We've been trying to make contact with aliens for years. Now the day is fast approaching when we might finally succeed. But will our extraterrestrial friends come in peace? Or will they want to eat us? Astronomer David Whitehouse explores the perils of a close encounter

However, race plays a unique role. Black fans in the survey are more than twice as likely to want Bonds to break Aaron's record (74 percent to 28 percent), and 37 percent of black fans think Bonds used steroids, compared to 76 percent of white fans.

"We did that same calculation [how many hydrogen stations would they need] for the 100 largest cities in the U.S. ... and we connected all the cities with stations on the freeway with stations every 25 miles, and that added up to 12,000 stations.

The actual annual sum is only an educated guess, because no scientist believes that the tally of life ends at the 1.5 million species already discovered; estimates range as high as 100 million species on earth, with 10 million as the median guess.

They were in the rainforest together on a mission to see firsthand where farmers were cutting down virgin forest to grow soy beans for, among other customers, McDonald's.

Strizki isn't dissuaded by criticisms that his system is too expensive or too inefficient to be practical. He's determined to push technology ahead toward an end goal – totally clean energy – and he sees renewable hydrogen as the best solution.

Discovery of the sauropod, estimated to have weighed between 40 and 48 tons, is reported in Friday's issue of the journal Science. Named Turiasaurus riodevensis, the animal lived in the Teruel area of what is now Spain in the late Jurassic period, about 150 million years ago.

10. Do NOT buy a plasma TV: they use 5 times as much energy as other models.

Quietly but steadily, under the watchful eye of some of the nation's top scientists, hundreds of technicians and researchers isolate cells and scrutinize data in 18 immense laboratories at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

They are the visible signs of an invisible, parallel world within the universe of aerospace and defense: the classified, or "black," world of secret military programs.

I was reading the book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond and the following passage really struck me. This could be the US in 20-30 years.

The focus on biofuels to solve our energy and climate change crises could have potentially disastrous environmental consequences.