Science News

NEW ORLEANS - National Guard troops stand ready, batteries and water bottles sold briskly, and one small-town mayor spent a sleepless night worrying. The New Orleans area watched as a storm marched across the Caribbean on the eve of Hurricane Katrina's third anniversary.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Gustav was heading toward Jamaica early Thursday while many miles away, residents in the New Orleans area watched it with a nervous eye.

HAVANA (AFP) - Tropical Storm Gustav rumbled Thursday toward Jamaica and Cuba and threatened to take hurricane force winds to Louisiana after leaving 22 people dead in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Arctic ice cap keeps melting under the effects of global warming and in August saw its second largest summer shrinkage since satellite observations began 30 years ago, US scientists said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers have captured images of a powerful collision of galaxy clusters and say it may shed light on the behavior of dark matter.

NASA engineers successfully freed a stuck metal pin on the space shuttle Atlantis late Tuesday, but the work delayed plans to roll the spacecraft out to its Florida launch pad this week.

TOKYO (AFP) - A giant panda cub has been born at a Japanese zoo, the first to be successfully bred in Japan through artificial insemination in two decades, officials said Wednesday.

Some zoos in the U.S. offer an exotic way to fertilize their gardens through a unique method of recycling waste from zoo animals.

BEIJING (AFP) - Three giant pandas have been born in southwest China, bringing the total number of new arrivals of the endangered species this year to at least 19, state media reported.

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.

PARIS (AFP) - Scientists have used gene therapy on mouse embryos to grow hair cells with the potential to reduce hearing loss in adult animals, according to a study released Wednesday.

Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The Republican Party released a draft of its 2008 platform that differs from candidate John McCain on issues including immigration, stem-cell research and climate change, while endorsing his ideas for economic growth and free trade.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Prescribing instructions for Biogen Idec and Elan Corp's drug Tysabri should be revised to note cases of a serious brain disorder in patients who were using it as their sole treatment for multiple sclerosis, U.S. health regulators said on Monday.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday signed a bill giving the state authority to award TransCanada Corp a license to build and operate a multibillion-dollar pipeline to ship natural gas from the North Slope.

LONDON (AFP) - London shares closed higher on Wednesday, lifted out of earlier losses by an upbeat report on the US manufacturing sector which helped allay fears about the economic outlook, and amid a surge in oil prices.

LONDON (AFP) - World oil prices rallied on Wednesday as Tropical Storm Gustav remained a threat to US energy installations in the Gulf of Mexico despite being downgraded from hurricane status, analysts said.

PARIS (AFP) - Scientists have used gene therapy on mouse embryos to grow hair cells with the potential to reduce hearing loss in adult animals, according to a study released Wednesday.

A baby's first words are often "mama" and "dada," much to the delight of parents. Now scientists think they know why.

Scientists have cautioned that a warming planet could melt Greenland's vast ice sheet, a potentially catastrophic event that would raise sea levels and inundate coastal communities around the globe.