This tiny North American mystery bird species doesn't have any close relativesRuby-crowned kinglet, Regulus calendula, photographed in a backyard in Houston, Texas, USA.Image: Joseph Kennedy, 3 January 2011 [velociraptorize].Nikon D200, Kowa 883 telescope TSN-PZ camera eyepiece 1/400s f/8.0 at 1000.0mm iso400 Question: This sweet little bird is feeding at the same feeder as Wednesday's mystery...

ContributorNetwork - NASA Space Flight is reporting that a meeting took place at the Johnson Spaceflight Center to discuss the possibility of attaching a Bigelow inflatable module to the International Space Station.

Reuters - An 8,000-pound elephant at a Tennessee zoo backed a trainer into a wall and crushed her to death, and the zoo said on Saturday it had temporarily closed its elephant exhibit.

AFP - US President Barack Obama called Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard to offer condolences for the deaths and damage caused by flooding in Queensland state and its capital Brisbane, the White House said late...

Minneapolis astronomy professor, Parke Kunkle has suggested the signs of the zodiac are wrong, as the Earth's wobbly orbit means it is no longer aligned to the stars in the same way as when the system was first conceived.

Reuters - BP Plc and Russia's state-controlled Rosneft agreed to a share swap under which they plan to jointly explore for offshore oil and gas in a deal that gives the UK company access to areas of the Arctic previously reserved for Russian oil companies.

Reuters - A Russian minister said BP's experience in cleaning up the catastrophic Gulf of Mexico oil spill was one of the reasons Russia chose the British oil firm to help develop its fragile Arctic shelf oil fields.

(AP) -- Bank of America Corp. said its online banking service has been restored for all of its customers, after being inaccessible for some users for most of the day Friday.

(AP) -- In a cautionary tale for users of social-networking sites, a California man has admitted using personal information he gleaned from Facebook to hack into women's e-mail accounts, then send nude pictures of them to everyone in their address book.

Market-tracker comScore reported on Friday that Google finished 2010 strong, handling 66 percent of US online queries.

Rice bred to perform well in the toughest conditions where the poorest farmers grow rice is a step away from reaching farmers thanks to a major project led by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).

Just in time for Caturday, a cat, a box and ... VerschränkungWhat is it with cats and boxes? One cat can make holidays, birthdays and moving house into a bigger chore than necessary. These videos examine what happens when cats and boxes are placed into the same room. If that wasn't enough Caturday cuteness to give you a smile, here's a real-life cat demonstrating his fondness for boxes:...

AFP - Brazilians on Saturday braced for more rain, fearing more catastrophic landslides after walls of muddy water tore through towns and claimed nearly 550 lives in the country's worst flood disaster...

AFP - More than two weeks of heavy rains have left at least 47 people dead from flash floods and landslides in the Philippines, according to the...

The best of the rest from the Physics arXiv this week...

In research described as "a stark warning" to those tempted to start smoking, scientists are reporting that cigarette smoke begins to cause genetic damage within minutes -- not years -- after inhalation into the lungs. Their report, the first human study to detail the way certain substances in tobacco cause DNA damage linked to cancer, appears in ACS' Chemical Research in Toxicology, a monthly...

The New Mexico State University chile pepper breeding program recently released a new jalapeño pepper named "NuMex Jalmundo". The large pepper is being marketed for use in making the popular snack food jalapeño "poppers". With a heat level of 17,000 Scoville Heat Units, "NuMex Jalmundo" is considered to be medium hot. Seeds are available from the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State...

A team of researchers at Columbia Engineering and Columbia University Medical Center announced today the results of the first study comparing bone structure in Chinese-American women to Caucasian women. The report, just presented at the Orthopaedic Research Society's annual meeting at Long Beach, Calif., found that pre-menopausal Chinese-American women have far greater bone strength than their...

Rice bred to perform well in the toughest conditions where the poorest farmers grow rice is a step away from reaching farmers thanks to a major project led by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the International Rice Research Institute.

A new study of disease-resistant "Liberty" apples suggests that integrated fruit production (IFP) could be widely implemented in the northeastern United States. The use of an organic fruit production (OFP) system also showed potential for success. Cornell researchers found that marketable yields of apples can be produced in New York's humid growing conditions under both IFP and OFP, but noted that...