A phys­i­cist has cal­cu­lat­ed that in four spe­cial places on Earth each year, for a thou­sandth of a sec­ond, ob­jects might be able to move slight­ly with no push of any sort.The prop­o­si­tion stems from an un­u­su­al the­o­ry of mo­tion that some re­search­ers have de­vised to ex­plain move­ments of stars and galax­ies which, oth­er­wise, seem to vi­o­late the laws of grav­i­ty. For in­stance, stars ap­pear to or­bit the cen­ters of galax­ies faster than they should. ... [full story]

NEW YORK - The southwestern United States could be entering a long period of drought because of global warming, a study released Thursday predicted. Richard Seager of Columbia University, the lead author of the study published in Science, said the area from southern Colorado to southern California may have to deal with decades as dry as the drought that created the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, the Los Angeles Times reported. That would present residents ... [full story]

WASHINGTON - A new NASA study has found that in 2005 the Arctic replaced very little of the thick sea ice it normally loses and replenishes each year. Replenishment of this thick, perennial sea ice each year is essential to the maintenance and stability of the Arctic summer ice cover. The findings complement a NASA study released in fall 2006 that found a 14-percent drop in this perennial ice between 2004 and 2005. The lack ... [full story]

CAIRO - As Jews are observing Passover, Egypt's chief archaeologist says there's no scientific evidence God parted the Red Sea to allow them to escape a pharaoh's army.Known to Jews as the exodus from the desert and finding the Promised Land, the parting of the waters is seen as symbolic by Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's chief archaeologist who has scoured the territory, a Washington Post reporter wrote. Passover selebrates the flight from Egypt."Really, it's a ... [full story]

'TRUE FACTS' Aviation pioneer Orville Wright numbered the eggs that his chickens produced so that he could eat them in the precise order in which they had been laid. VERBATIM A great deal of the universe does not need any explanation. Elephants, for instance. Once molecules have learned to compete and to create other molecules in their own image, elephants, and things resembling elephants, will in due course be found roaming the countryside. Some of ... [full story]

The Expedition 14 crew of the International Space Station continued preparations for the April arrival of a new station crew by boarding their Soyuz TMA-9 craft and taking a 24-minute flight from one station docking port to another.Flight Engineer Mikhail Tyurin guided the Soyuz away from the Earth-facing port of the station's Zarya module and docked it to the aft port of the Zvezda module. The move frees the Zarya port for the arrival of ... [full story]

When the cat's away, the mice will play. And for some­what si­m­i­lar rea­sons, bi­ol­o­gists have long be­lieved that the ex­tinc­tion of di­no­saurs caused the great flour­ish­ing of mam­mals on Earth - a pro­cess that pro­duced spe­cies in­clud­ing ours. That's not quite the way things hap­pened, a study has found.   A Cape Hy­rax (Pro­ca­via ca­p­en­sis), a small Af­ri­can mam­mal that looks like a ro­dent but is ac­tu­al­ly re­lat­ed to ele­phants. Their com­mon an­ces­tor lived 83 mil­lion years ... [full story]

An odd, six-sided, honeycomb-shaped fea­ture en­cir­cling Sat­urn’s North Pole has cap­tured the in­ter­est of sci­en­tists with NASA’s Cas­si­ni space­craft mis­sion.  The agency’s Voy­ag­er 1 and 2 space­craft im­aged the hex­a­gon over two dec­ades ago, but its ap­pear­ance in new Cas­si­ni im­ages shows it’s long lived, height­en­ing the rid­dle, sci­en­tists said. This night­time view of Sat­urn's north pole shows a bi­zarre six-sided hex­a­gon fea­ture en­cir­cling the north pole. (Cour­te­sy: NASA/J­PL/U­ni­ver of Ar­i­zo­na) “We’ve nev­er seen an­y­thing ... [full story]

NASA astronaut Suni Williams will go faster than anyone has ever gone in the Boston Marathon. She will run the famed race in April as an official entrant from 210 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. This will be the first time an astronaut in space will be an official participant in a marathon. Williams hopes her unique run will serve as an inspiration."I encourage kids to start making physical fitness part of ... [full story]

'TRUE FACTS' An inch was originally measured as the width of a man's thumb. It has since been divided into various other increments, such as 25,400 microns, 4,000 silversmith's points, 1,000 mils, 72.27 points, 48 hair's-breaths, 23.24635 agates, 12 lines and 3 barley corns. VERBATIM PRIME NUMBERS - It would take 140 billion Big Mac beef patties to cover 1 square mile. CNS Photo. WHERE IS IT? - This is a picture of ... [full story]

The Expedition 14 crew continued work this week on scientific experiments and increased the bandwidth on the International Space Station's computer network. Commander Michael Lopez-Alegria and Flight Engineer Suni Williams spent time working with experiments that may hold the key to several aspects of long-duration space flight as NASA looks forward to missions back to the moon and on to Mars or other destinations. Each served as test subject and operator for the Anomalous Long ... [full story]

About half of a 6- to 8-foot reptile, including long, needlepoint teeth, were found imbedded in rock south of Dayville An ancient sea-going crocodile has surfaced from the rocks of Crook County in eastern Oregon. Really.   Artist's rendering of a full, intact thalattosuchia, a fish-like crocodile from the Jurassic Period. By Jon Hughes.  Its discovery by the North American Research Group (NARG), whose members were digging for Jurassic-age mollusks known as ammonites, is another confirmation that ... [full story]

NASA released on Wednesday never-before-seen images that show the sun's magnetic field is much more turbulent and dynamic than previously known. The international spacecraft Hinode, formerly known as Solar B, took the images.Hinode, Japanese for "sunrise," was launched Sept. 23, 2006, to study the sun's magnetic field and how its explosive energy propagates through the different layers of the solar atmosphere. The spacecraft's uninterrupted high-resolution observations of the sun will have an impact on solar ... [full story]