Whale-eating zombie sea worms from the deep
A new species of marine worm that lives off whale bones on the sea floor has been described by scientists.The creature was found on a minke carcass in relatively shallow water close to Tjarno Marine Laboratory on the Swedish coast.
Such "zombie worms", as they are often called, are known from the deep waters of the Pacific but their presence in the North Sea is a major surprise.
Source: BBC. More here.
[+] Tags: George Hopkin | Odd | Science
Nintendo has joined forces with McDonald's to offer free wireless internet access in the US for its DS handheld games console. The service means McDonald's customers will be able to play selected DS titles against other gamers around the globe.
The Velociraptor dinosaur made famous by the Hollywood movie Jurassic Park may not have been quite the super-efficient killer we all thought.
People who keep rodents as pets should take care not to catch salmonella, experts advise. The American Centers for Disease Control has reports of 28 people, including seven young children, who have caught strains of the bacteria carried by pet rats, mice and hamsters.
The world's first autonomous robotic fish are the latest attraction at the London Aquarium. Biologically inspired by the common carp, the new designs can avoid objects and swim around a specially designed tank entirely of their own accord.
With the graceful flight of hawks and eagles in mind, NASA aerospace engineer Michael Allen hand-launched a lightweight motorized model sailplane over the Southern California desert recently, hoping it would catch plumes of rising air called thermals.
Alligators have clashed with nonnative pythons before in the Everglades. But when a 13-foot python tried to swallow a 6-foot gator recently, the result wasn't pretty. The snake apparently bit off too much gator — and ruptured from the girth of its prey. The python was found with the gator's hindquarters protruding from its midsection. Its stomach still surrounded the alligator's head, shoulders, and forelimbs.
Peter Diamandis, the man behind the $10m X-Prize for suborbital space travel, has brought forward his new initiative: the Rocket Racing League. The RRL will see Grand Prix-style races between rocket planes, flown by top pilots through a "3D trackway" just 5,000ft (1,500m) above the ground. The first "X-Racers" will be built for the series, but it is hoped new teams will soon enter with novel designs.
...they don't come more cosmically successful than Google, a company whose workforce is ballooning by hundreds of workers per month and which recently raised more than $4 billion for new projects by selling shares in the company. It announced Wednesday it was to build a research complex at NASA's Research Center and collaborate with the space agency's scientists.
However, before we consider the possibility of Google conquering the entire galaxy...A representative from the search engine colossus explained NASA and Google have done little more than ink a "memorandum of understanding," committing the two parties to work together in a range of areas including IT solutions, data management and nanotechnology.
The likely source of the respiratory disease Sars is the horseshoe bat, a new study suggests. Researchers found a virus closely related to the Sars coronavirus in bats from three regions of China.



