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| Sandia supercomputers offer new explanation of Tunguska disaster |
| The stunning amount of forest devastation at Tunguska a century ago in Siberia may have been caused by an asteroid only a fraction as large as previously published estimates, Sandia National Laboratories supercomputer simulations suggest. |
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| HUBBLE AND KECK TEAM UP TO FIND FARTHEST KNOWN GALAXY IN UNIVERSE |
| An international team of astronomers may have set a new record in discovering what is the most distant known galaxy in the universe. Located an estimated 13 billion light-years away, the object is being viewed at a time only 750 million years after the big bang, when the universe was barely 5 percent of its current age. |
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| ANCIENT INSECTS BUZZ INTO HISTORY BOOKS |
| Scientists have discovered the remains of a 400 million-year-old insect, the oldest ever located, in a fossil unearthed in Scotland in the early 1900s. |
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| THE VOLE TRUTH ABOUT LEMMING DEATHS |
| One of the oddest phenomena in the natural world - the sudden mass death of lemmings - has been resolved, according to a trio of European biologists. |
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| TURTLES TOUGH OUT SHARK ATTACKS |
| Pregnant sea turtles are capable of suppressing the agony of a severe shark attack just so they can make it to shore and lay their eggs, U.S. and Australian researchers suggests. |
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| EXPLANATION OFFERED FOR ANTARCTICAS BLOOD FALLS |
| Researchers here have discovered that a reddish deposit seeping out from the face of a glacier in Antarcticas remote Taylor Valley is probably the last remnant of an ancient salt-water lake. The lake probably formed as much as 5 million years ago when the sea levels were higher and the ocean reached far inland. |
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| GIANT BUBBLES COULD SINK SHIPS, SAY MATHS EXPERTS |
| Methane bubbles from the sea floor could be responsible for the mysterious sinking of ships in areas like the Bermuda Triangle and the North Sea, new Australian research confirms. |
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| WHALING MAY HAVE DECIMATED SEALS, SEA LIONS |
| Crashes in seal, sea lion and sea otter populations in some parts of the world may have occurred because intense commercial whaling forced killer whales to turn to new prey for food, a new U.S. study suggests. |
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| METHANE ERUPTION BLAMED FOR MASS EXTINCTION |
| A massive explosion of colourless, odourless natural gas erupting from the ocean depths may have caused the worst mass extinction in the Earth's history some 251 million years ago, according to U.S. geologists. |
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| ANCIENT SUPERFLOOD BROUGHT CLIMATE CHAOS |
| A catastrophic 'superflood' following the rupture of a massive glacier-dammed lake in Canada at the end of the Ice Age probably plunged the world into centuries of climatic chaos. |
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| LEAF FALL IN ANCIENT POLAR FORESTS STILL A MYSTERY |
| Explorers in the 1800s discovered through fossils that deciduous forests once covered the poles, but researchers still do not know why leaf-dropping trees were preferred over evergreens. |
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| GLOBAL GARDEN GROWS GREENER |
| A NASA-Department of Energy jointly funded study concludes the Earth has been greening over the past 20 years. As climate changed, plants found it easier to grow. |
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| MYSTERY OF THE MIN MIN LIGHTS EXPLAINED |
| An Australian neuroscientist claims he can conjure up the mysterious Australian outback phenomenon of the Min Min lights, now that he has worked out what causes them. |
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| LIGHTNING REALLY DOES STRIKE MORE THAN TWICE |
| NASA-funded scientists have recently learned that cloud-to-ground lightning frequently strikes the ground in two or more places and that the chances of being struck are about 45 percent higher than what people commonly assume. |
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| CURSE OF TUTANKHAMEN FINALLY LAID TO REST |
| After 80 years, the curse of Tutankhamen's tomb - credited with a host of untimely deaths since its discovery - has finally been disproven by an Australian epidemiologist. |
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| COSMIC RAYS LINKED TO GLOBAL WARMING |
| Researchers studying global warming have often been confounded by the differences between observed increases in surface-level temperatures and unchanging low-atmosphere temperatures. Because of this discrepancy, some have argued that global warming is unproven, suggesting instead that true warming should show uniformly elevated temperatures from the surface through the atmosphere. Researchers have proposed a theory that changes in cloud cover could help explain the puzzling phenomenon, but none-until now-have come up with an argument that could account for the varying heat profiles. |
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| GHOSTLY ASTEROIDS CLUE TO MISSING MATTER |
| Astronomers have lost thousands of comets. A University of Melbourne physicist thinks they may still be there, just invisible and some of them potentially on a collision course with Earth.
Dr Robert Foot suggests that many of the missing comets could be made of an exotic material called 'mirror matter', a new type of invisible matter that a small group of physicists believe could be the elusive 'dark matter'. Dark matter is considered the cosmic scaffolding that makes up most of the universe, but nobody can identify it. |
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| COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY STUDY TIES THE FREQUENCY OF EARTHQUAKES TO OCEAN TIDES |
| A Columbia University scientist studying an active seafloor volcano in the Pacific Ocean has determined that there is a correlation between the hundreds of micro earthquakes she recorded and the ocean tides. |
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| NEW REPORT EXPLAINS ICE-AGE MYSTERY |
| University of California researchers have solved a longstanding mystery for scientists trying to understand how Earth's climate can quickly shift between cold and warm modes. |
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