Science News

NEW ORLEANS - A former Army Corps of Engineers consultant and a dirt subcontractor were indicted Thursday on bribery charges stemming from an investigation into levee work after Hurricane Katrina.

NEW ORLEANS - The state will take over an effort to collect grant money from Hurricane Katrina victims who got too much, citing a lack of confidence in a private contractor's ability to determine who owes money, a Louisiana official said Thursday.

NEW ORLEANS - Severe storms with damaging winds and possible tornadoes pounded the South, killing at least one person in Louisiana and shattering windows at the Texas Capitol.

Weather around the U.S.A.

A storm was expected to move across the Mississippi Valley and along the Appalachian Mountains on Thursday, bringing rain and thunderstorms through the Southeast and lower half of the Mississippi Valley.

NASA is expecting delays for the first tests of the rocket that will replace its aging space shuttles after they retire in 2010, agency officials said Thursday.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers are baffled after finding an exotic type of star called a pulsar apparently locked in an elongated orbit around a star much like the sun -- an arrangement defying what had been known about such objects.

MOSCOW (AFP) - Russian space scientists announced on Thursday a new breakthrough in a long pedigree of firsts: the birth of 30 grandchildren of a "space cockroach" who spent 12 days in orbit.

The universe is twice as bright as it appears, astronomers now suggest.

I visited Richard Quinn's lab at NASA Ames Research Center to learn more about his work on Earth and on Mars. Richard Quinn and John Marshall are both scientists in the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute; they are instrument scientists and team members on NASA's soon-to-land Mars Phoenix Lander.

WASHINGTON - Put at risk by global warming, the polar bear is getting a life line: The government has declared it a threatened species in need of increased protection. But another round of legal battles surrounding the majestic animal may be just beginning.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US government has listed polar bears as a threatened species owing to a drastic reduction in Arctic sea ice, but insisted the step did not mark a policy shift to attack global warming.

WASHINGTON - The Interior Department declared the polar bear a threatened species Wednesday because of the loss of Arctic sea ice but also cautioned the decision should not be viewed as a path to address global warming.

TOKYO (AFP) - Greenpeace on Thursday accused Japanese whalers of stealing meat from the country's annual research hunt in the Antarctic and selling it on the black market.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Polar bears were listed on Wednesday as threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act because their sea ice habitat is melting away.

The sun bounces up and down as it roams the Milky Way, and such wavering might have hurled showers of comets Earth's way that caused mass extinctions, including the one that killed the dinosaurs, a new study claims.

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina - A senior U.S. Homeland Security official is in Argentina to discuss money laundering, human trafficking — and dinosaur eggs.

Fossil microbes found along an iron-rich river in Spain reveal how signs of life could be preserved in minerals found on Mars. The discovery may help to equip the next generation Mars rover with the tools it would need to find evidence of past life on the planet.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scraps of protein from the bones of a 68 million-year-old dinosaur and a mastodon carcass confirm their places in the family tree of life on Earth, researchers reported on Thursday.

Tyrannosaurus rex just got a firm grip on the animal kingdom's family tree, right next to chickens and ostriches. New analyses of soft tissue from a T.rex leg bone re-confirm that birds are dinosaurs' closest living relatives.

PARIS (AFP) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy's government suffered a setback on Tuesday as lawmakers unexpectedly threw out a controversial bill on genetically-modified (GM) crops.

NEW YORK - News that scientists have for the first time genetically altered a human embryo is drawing fire from some watchdog groups that say it's a step toward creating "designer babies."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An experimental gene therapy treatment appears to have helped eight children with a rare and incurable neurological disorder, although it may have been responsible for the death of one, researchers reported on Tuesday.

MANILA (AFP) - With food prices hitting record highs the jury is still out in Asia as to whether genetically modified crops hold the key to future food security.

WASHINGTON - Science has provided the souped-up seeds to feed the world, through biotechnology and old-fashioned crossbreeding. Now the problem is the dirt they're planted in.

WASHINGTON - Congress responded speedily to voters' angst over rising grocery prices and $4-a-gallon gasoline Thursday, bucking President Bush's veto threats with lopsided votes to boost food stamps and farm subsidies — after ordering Bush to quit pouring oil into the nation's emergency reserves.

WASHINGTON - The Senate late Wednesday approved and sent to the White House legislation directing President Bush to temporarily halt oil shipments into the government's emergency reserve, hoping to lower energy prices.

SINGAPORE (AFP) - Crude oil prices were slightly higher in Asian trade on Wednesday despite a forecast for slower energy demand growth, analysts said.

PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad - A top U.S. energy official says Washington wants to boost ties with Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean nation that is the No. 1 supplier of liquid natural gas to the United States.

WASHINGTON - Congress voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to challenge President Bush to temporarily halt the daily shipment of thousands of barrels of oil into the government's emergency reserve.

PARIS - Divers trained in archaeology discovered a marble bust of an aging Caesar in the Rhone River that France's Culture Ministry said Tuesday could be the oldest known.

TOKYO (AFP) - The world's smallest one-man helicopter will soon take flight in the birthplace of Leonardo da Vinci, who is credited with having first thought of a vertical-flight machine, its developer said.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Exposure in the womb to common chemicals used to make everything from plastic bottles to pizza box liners may program a person to become obese later in life, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - Astronomers have discovered the youngest known supernova in the Milky Way galaxy, still just a baby at 140 years old. The scientists, who announced their findings Wednesday, used a radio observatory in New Mexico and NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in space to identify when the supernova, or stellar, explosion occurred. They put the star-dying event at sometime around 1868.

The 7.9-magnitude earthquake that hit China's Sichuan province, leveling buildings and taking tens of thousands of lives, might not have wrought such destruction in the United States, experts say.