Research has shown that bacteria – among the simplest life forms on Earth – have a sense of smell. Scientists from Newcastle University in the UK have demonstrated that a bacterium commonly found in soil can sniff and react to ammonia in the air. It was previously thought that this “olfaction” was limited to more [...]

Some of the cattle cloned to boost food production in the US have been created from the cells of dead animals, according to a US cloning company. Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal’s meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass. US scientists [...]

A belief that Jesus survived the crucifixion and spent his remaining years in Kashmir has led to a run-down shrine in Srinagar making it firmly onto the must-visit-in India tourist trail. In the backstreets of downtown Srinagar is an old building known as the Rozabal shrine. It’s in a part of the city where the [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have sequenced the DNA from four frozen hairs of a Greenlander who died 4,000 years ago in a study they say takes genetic technology into several new realms. Surprisingly, the long-dead man appears to have originated in Siberia and is unrelated to modern Greenlanders, Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen [...]

(BBC NEWS) – Meet Sinosauropteryx, a very spiky little dinosaur. A team of scientists from China and the UK has now revealed that the bristles of this 125-million-year-old dinosaur were in fact ginger-coloured feathers. The researchers say that the diminutive carnivore had a “Mohican” of feathers running along its head and back. It also had [...]

Here is the list of 25 countries deemed by The National Geographic magazine as the world’s best travel destinations for 2010: Bhutan || Outfitter: Bio Bio Expeditions Bolivia || Outfitter: Nantahala Outdoor Center Botswana || Outfitter: Explore Inc Canada– B.C. || Outfitter: Monashee Adventure Tours Canada – Manitoba || Outfitter: Earthwatch Institute Chile + Argentina [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists who crashed two spacecraft into a crater on the moon said on Friday they found water in the dust they kicked up, just as they had hoped. The barely visible plume knocked into the air by NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite or LCROSS mission last month contained at least [...]

They are choice food and rare pets in the Philippines, and could soon become dead reptiles crawling – the equivalents of Sean Penn in the 1995 film, “Dead Man Walking,” waiting for the end, not by lethal injection, but through direct extinction. The first “death row” candidate, the Panay monitor lizard (scientific name: Varanus mabitang) [...]

(BBC NEWS) – More than a third of species assessed in a major international biodiversity study are threatened with extinction, scientists have warned. Out of the 47,677 species in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 17,291 were deemed to be at serious risk. These included 21% of all known mammals, 30% of amphibians, 70% [...]

The Philippine Institute for Volcanology and Seismology lists down the 22 active volcanoes in the country: including their location in grid, province, their height, number of historical eruptions and their latest eruption of activity. Source: Philippine Institute for Volcanology and Seismology

KARONGA, Malawi (Reuters) – The latest discovery of pre-historic tools and remains of hominids in Malawi’s remote northern district of Karonga provides further proof that the area could be the cradle of humankind, a leading German researcher said. Professor Friedemann Schrenk of the Goethe University in Frankfurt told Reuters that two students working on the [...]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – European astronomers announced they had found 32 new planets orbiting stars outside our solar system and said on Monday they believe their find means that 40 percent or more of Sun-like stars have such planets. The planets range in size from about five times the size of Earth to about five times [...]