The whale captured meals one at a time, Fitzgerald adds, using its powerful jaws to "rip off and swallow larger chunks of flesh from its fishy prey."

The animal's "truly enormous eyes for its size" represent an adaptation for heightened underwater vision, he says, which also suggests it was an active marine predator.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/...e-fossil_2.html

Animals and insects communicate through an invisible world of scents. By exploiting infrared technology, researchers at Rockefeller University just made that world visible. With the ability to see smells, these scientists now show that when fly larvae detect smells with both olfactory organs they find their way toward a scented target more accurately than when they detect them with one.
http://www.physorg.com/news117725070.html

The Macro-Fiber Composite, or MFC, is made up of ceramic fibers and can be attached to a structure to bend it, reduce vibrations and monitor force. A team at NASA's Langley Research Center created the flexible and durable material.

By applying voltage to the MFC, the ceramic fibers change shape to expand or contract and turn the resulting force into a bending or twisting action on the material. Likewise, voltage is generated in proportion to the force applied to the MFC material, NASA said in a statement.NASA sees MFC as being used in industrial and research applications for vibration monitoring and dampening. MFC technology could also find its way into inflatable space structures can be used for antennas, communication satellites, space station trusses, and solar sail support structures, NASA said.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23284

Mars could be in for an asteroid hit. A newly discovered hunk of space rock has a 1 in 75 chance of slamming into the Red Planet on Jan. 30, scientists said Thursday.

"These odds are extremely unusual. We frequently work with really long odds when we track ... threatening asteroids," said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near Earth Object Program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNe...?hub=TopStories

The icy feature has been spotted in images from the European Space Agency's (Esa) Mars Express spacecraft.

Ancient glaciers, many millions of years old, have been seen before on the Red Planet, but this one may only be several thousand years old.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7151190.stm

team of Italian scientists from the University of Bologna recently identified a lake in the Tunguska region as the possible impact crater from the 1908 Tunguska event. Lake Cheko is a small bowl-shaped lake, situated approximately 8 kilometers north-north-west of the epicenter of the cataclysmic event. Although the lake is relatively shallow and more elliptical in its form (elliptical craters usually occur only if the angle of entry is less than about 10 degrees), samples from the basin suggest that the lake fills an impact crater.

http://www.tfot.info/news/1070/in-s...-meteorite.html

Recent breakthroughs in scramjet engines could mean two-hour flights from New York to Tokyo. They could also mean missiles capable of striking any continent in a moment's notice. No wonder the race to develop them is as fierce as ever

http://www.popsci.com/popsci/aviati...ecbccdrcrd.html

Check out this video from the Google/Lunar X PRIZE Competition..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K4z...ucers-and-more/

An international effort to launch a robotic mission to fetch and return a Martian sample back to Earth within the next decade is gaining steam.

Members of the International Mars Architecture for Return Samples (IMARS) convened in Washington, DC, US, in late November to lay the foundations for an international collaboration for a Martian soil sample return mission.

http://space.newscientist.com/artic...l-to-earth.html

NASA's fleet of THEMIS spacecraft, launched less than 8 months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called "substorms" and the source of their power. The discoveries include giant magnetic ropes that connect Earth's upper atmosphere to the Sun and explosions in the outskirts of Earth's magnetic field.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y...1dec_themis.htm

New observations from NASA's long-running Voyager 2 spacecraft show the solar system is asymmetrical, likely from disturbances in the interstellar magnetic field, scientists reported Monday.
The discovery came after the 30-year-old unmanned probe sailed near the edge of the solar system this past summer following its twin, Voyager 1, which reached that part of space in 2004.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071211...lar_system_edge

François Roche of French architecture firm R&Sie(n) (their invisible house here ) won the competition to build a new "museum of ice"- an art museum and alpine ice research station in Évolène, Switzerland. (We suppose like Joni Mitchell's Tree Museum, we are going to need Ice Museums). They are going to build it with a monster CNC machine in Lausanne, like stacking up a loaf of bread.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/200...ting_out_bu.php

Toyota unveiled today two new robots, a "Mobility Robot" and a "Violin-playing Robot" -- the newest additions to its team of Toyota "Partner Robots" being developed to support people's everyday life. The mobility robot, designed around the i-Real concept shown in Tokyo earlier this year (see the Toyota folks giving us a demo of the i-Real chair-concept-thing in Tokyo here) is a robot for the "aged." The 'bot's supposedly capable of autonomous movement over uneven ground and around obstacles and has a traveling range of 12 miles per charge and a top speed of 3.7 mph. We'll have more pictures up shortly, but for the moment, here's a bit of sexy violins by way of the 17 joints in the robots hands and arms -- because pics are all you're getting as the super number one best automaker from the land of the rising sun's not expected to have these bad boys any time before 2010.

http://jalopnik.com/cars/novelties/...orld-330647.php

Yeah, this idea has definitely been around the block a time or two, but Eureka Aerospace is doing a whole lot more than just envisioning yet another concept. Its 200-pound, 5-foot long prototype has recently undergone testing, and reportedly, it's been able to completely and utterly incapacitate any vehicle that dared roll in its path. The device has been used to shut down four whips thus far, each from a distance of 10 to 50-feet, and all it took was a microwave pulse lasting some 50-nanoseconds to do it.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/05/...anoseconds-fla/

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of what appears to be the world's most intact dinosaur mummy: a 67-million-year-old plant-eater that contains fossilized bones and skin tissue, and possibly muscle and organs.

Preserved by a natural fluke of time and chemistry, the four-ton mummified hadrosaur, a duck-billed herbivore common to North America, could reshape the understanding of dinosaurs and their habitat, its finders say.

"There is no doubt about it that this dinosaur is a very, very significant find," said Tyler Lyson, a graduate student in geology at Yale University who discovered the dinosaur in North Dakota.

"To say we are excited would be an understatement," said Phil Manning, a paleontologist at England's University of Manchester who is leading the examination. "When I first saw it in the field, (I thought) 'Shiiiit, that's a really well preserved dinosaur.' It has the potential to be a top-10 dinosaur, globally."

http://www.wired.com/science/discov...7/12/dino_mummy

Haim Weizman is a chemist by trade and an Internet moviemaker on the side. In his first video, a telegenic narrator in a lab coat swirls a flask as electronic music plays in the background. Researchers like Weizman are increasingly uploading their experiments and lectures online -- and discovering filmmaking is more art than science.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/12/03/...e.ap/index.html

At Tokyo's 12th Robo-One Grand Championship match, two-legged robots jabbed, ducked, hurled balloons and even sang in their quest to become world champ.

Twenty-five finalist robots put up their fists to knock one another out of a ring on Saturday, showing off some of the latest moves originated by children, homemakers and other robot fans in the world's biggest robot market.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071203...MzBvggo_Tys0NUE