Science News

GONAIVES, Haiti - A ship carrying 33 tons of U.N. relief supplies managed to dock Friday, the first significant aid delivery after four days without food or water for thousands of survivors from Tropical Storm Hanna.

NEW ORLEANS (AFP) - People too poor or ill to flee Hurricane Gustav on their own began returning Friday by buses and trains to storm-battered neighborhoods in New Orleans.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Space shuttle Atlantis' launch on a final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed because of tropical storms, NASA said on Friday.

WASHINGTON - President Bush is keeping tabs on the Gulf Coast's recovery from Hurricane Gustav while monitoring the threat from two other looming storms, Hanna and the even more-powerful Ike.

SALVO, North Carolina (Reuters) - Fierce Hurricane Ike weakened as it charged across the Atlantic on Friday and took aim at south Florida and the oil fields of the Gulf of Mexico while Tropical Storm Hanna was set to crash ashore in the Carolinas after killing at least 136 people in Haiti.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found two new, partial rings around Saturn that each accompany a small moon, shedding light on what determines whether a partial or complete ring forms with the moon.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Space shuttle Atlantis' launch on a final mission to service the Hubble Space Telescope has been delayed because of tropical storms, NASA said on Friday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - NASA has delayed next month's space shuttle launch to the Hubble Space Telescope by two days.

New data from Mars' surface is puzzling NASA scientists: A fork-like probe on the Phoenix Mars Lander has sensed changes in humidity in the Martian air, but finds the dirt below perplexingly dry.

PARIS (AFP) - Far from Earth, a robot spacecraft has been prodded from deep slumber to make a rare encounter with an asteroid, the intriguing orbital debris that could offer clues into the making of the Solar System.

WASHINGTON - At the National Governors Association conference where she first met John McCain, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin had other business: making her case to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne against classifying the polar bear as a threatened species.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Environmental and animal rights activists dressed as dolphins Wednesday staged a die-in in Washington to protest what they called the "horrific butchering" of thousands of dolphins by Japanese fishermen every year.

TAIPEI (AFP) - Officials at Taiwan's biggest zoo said Wednesday they hoped to welcome a pair of giant pandas from rival China as early as November, a move expected to draw millions of tourists to the capital.

LONDON - After meeting with animal rights activists, the British military said Tuesday that it will study alternative materials to replace the bearskin hats worn by the soldiers who guard Buckingham Palace.

Black-footed ferrets at the Smithsonian's National Zoo have birthed two kits sired by males who died in 1999 and 2000.

PARIS (AFP) - A fresh storm has broken out over an ancient fossil presented by its defenders as a forebear of humanity and dismissed by its critics as the remains of a vulgar chimp.

A turtle that toddled alongside the dinosaurs died just days before laying a clutch of eggs. Now, about 75 million years later, paleontologists are announcing their find of the fossilized mother-to-be and the eggs tucked inside her body.

CARACAS, Venezuela - An ancient tar pit exposed when Venezuelan oil workers laid a pipeline has yielded a rich trove of fossils, including a type of saber-toothed cat that paleontologists had never found before in South America. Scientists say the find holds the promise of many discoveries to come.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A US-led team of archaeologists said Thursday they had discovered by chance what is believed to be the largest find of Stone Age-era remains ever uncovered in the Sahara Desert.

SYDNEY (AFP) - The chance discovery of the remains of a prehistoric giant kangaroo has cast doubts on the long-held view that climate change drove it and other mega-fauna to extinction, a new study reveals.

WASHINGTON - Scientists have mapped the cascade of genetic changes that turn normal cells in the brain and pancreas into two of the most lethal cancers. The result points to a new approach for fighting tumors and maybe even catching them sooner. Genes blamed for one person's brain tumor were different from the culprits for the next patient, making the puzzle of cancer genetics even more complicated.

BRNO, Czech Republic (Reuters) - Just a few steps from the monastery where Gregor Mendel pioneered the field of genetics some 150 years ago, Czech officials hope to nurture their own biotech revolution.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A large study of Swedish twins indicates that a common genetic cause underlies both low birth weight and the propensity to develop type 2 diabetes.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Food and milk from the offspring of cloned animals may have entered the U.S. food supply, the U.S. government said on Tuesday, but it would be impossible to know because there is no difference between cloned and conventional products.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The same gene that affects a rodent's ability to mate for life may affect human marriages, Swedish and U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

ST. PAUL (Reuters) - Presidential rivals John McCain and Barack Obama, back on the campaign trail after their party conventions, clashed over the ailing U.S. economy on Friday as unemployment hit its highest monthly rate in nearly five years.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - A long-delayed natural gas pipeline championed by Gov. Sarah Palin that would carry supplies from Alaska to Canada and then to the lower 48 states exists in concept only and is years away from fruition.

MOSCOW (AFP) - British and Russian shareholders on Thursday announced an end to a months-long feud for control of joint oil venture TNK-BP, in a move hailed by the Kremlin as a positive signal to foreign investors.

JAKARTA (AFP) - A decision by Indonesian palm oil companies to reject a moratorium on land clearing is threatening to wipe out more than 8,000 orangutans in the next three years, activists said Thursday.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - A helicopter carrying foreign contractors crashed into an oil platform off the coast of Dubai, killing all seven people on board and halting production in one of the emirate's four offshore oil fields, officials said Thursday.

LONDON (Reuters) - It's a discovery that would make even Sherlock Holmes proud. British scientists have developed a new crime-fighting technique that allows police to lift fingerprints from bullets even if a criminal has wiped down a shell casing.

Food for thought: Intellectual activities make people eat more than when just resting, according to a study that sheds new light on brain food.

Summer is over. School, crisp breezes and colored leaves are inevitable. But is the same true for catching a cold?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The same gene that affects a rodent's ability to mate for life may affect human marriages, Swedish and U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

INUVIK, Northwest Territories (Reuters) - Amanda Joynt reached down and picked a fresh tomato from the vine. That's no small feat when you are living 200 km (120 miles) above the Arctic Circle in Canada's Far North.