Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science-fiction writer who’s now a professor emeritus at San Diego State University. We're living through a period of unprecedented technological and scientific advances, Vinge says, and sometime soon the convergence of fields such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology will push humanity past a tipping point, ushering in a period of wrenching change. After that moment -- the Singularity -- the world will be as different from today,s world as this one is from the Stone Age.

The species is one of six North American bird species thought to have become extinct since 1880. Indians believed the bird's bill had magical powers. Its habitat was largely eliminated between 1880 and the 1940s because of logging. The last official ivory-bill sighting was in 1944 in northern Louisiana.

"My first thought was 'My God. It's the largest pileated woodpecker I've seen in my life," said Sparling, 49. Ivory-billed woodpeckers are a little larger than an average crow, with a wing span of about 19 inches.

Scientists are baffled. Possible explanations include a unknown virus or a fungus in the pond.

"You see the animals crawling on the ground, swelling and then exploding," German conservationist Werner Smolnik told AFP news agency.

The bodies of the toads expanded to three and a half times their normal size, he said.

The pair showed patterns of parallel lines in 1 of 8 orientations to four volunteers. By focusing on brain regions involved in visual perception they were able to recognise which orientation the subjects were observing.

Each line orientation corresponded to a different pattern of brain activity, although the patterns were different in each person. What is more, when two sets of lines were superimposed and the subjects were asked to focus on one set, the researchers could work out which one they were thinking of from the brain images.

Present GM crops are modified with genes from bacteria to make them tolerate herbicides, so that they are not harmed when fields are sprayed to kill weeds. But most of them are only able to deal with a single herbicide, which means that it has to be used over and over again, allowing weeds to build up resistance to it.

But the researchers at the National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba, north of Tokyo, have found that adding the human touch gave the rice immunity to 13 different herbicides. This would mean that weeds could be kept down by constantly changing the chemicals used.

Do you want a seven-day weather forecast for your ZIP code? Or hour-by-hour predictions of the temperature, wind speed, humidity and chance of rain? Or weather data beamed to your cellphone? But under a bill pending in the U.S. Senate, it might all disappear. The bill, introduced last week by Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., would prohibit federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel, which offer their own forecasts through paid services and free ad-supported Web sites.

"The weather service proved so instrumental and popular and helpful in the wake of the hurricanes. How can you make an argument that we should pull it off the Net now?" said Nelson's spokesman, Dan McLaughlin. "What are you going to do, charge hurricane victims to go online, or give them a pop-up ad?"

The traps are woven together using hairs stripped from the ants' host plant and reinforced with fungus, producing a platform with pitted holes. "The ants are always hiding just under the holes, waiting with their mandibles open. When an insect arrives they immediately grab the legs and antennae," says Orivel. This pulling immobilises the victim, stretching it out as though being tortured on a mediaeval rack.

Worker ants then clamber over their helpless prey, biting and stinging until the victim is paralysed or dead. The carcass is then chopped into small pieces while still on the rack or, more likely, carried back to the leaf pouch to be devoured.

Scientists have not figured out exactly how either critter works, but quite a bit is known. Maggots eat dead and infected tissue and other infectious organisms, which are later killed in maggots' guts. They secrete enzymes that break down dead tissue, turning it into a mush they can then slurp up.

Leech saliva is made up of a potent cocktail of more than 30 different proteins that, among other things, helps to numb pain, reduce swelling and keep blood flowing.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

Taken together, the bacteria in our guts contain 100 times more genes than our human cells do. The ecosystems they form are the densest known in nature. Our feces are about half bacteria by weight. Yet we know more about the microbes of the soil and the seas than we know about these intimate companions, said Lora Hooper, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center. Gordon said the report, published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science, is the first comprehensive inventory of a microbial community so vast that it is "mind-boggling." When the gut microbes are in balance, they help keep us well. Thrown out of balance, they may contribute to disease.

Gregory Benford's idea is to build a concave Fresnel Lens 1000 kilometres across but only a few millimetres thick at the L1 stable orbital point between us and the Sun, to slightly diffuse its light and cool us down enough to balance the warming effect of carbon dioxide, methane etc.

Dr Benford, while doing most of the work himself, has exploited his friends at NASA to confirm that the engineering is viable, and the results were astounding: The whole project could be achieved with today's technology at a cost of $10 billion US dollars up-front, and another ten for maintenance over the decades of designed lifespan.

The conventional wisdom is that the tornado threat goes down when the cells merge into 100-mile-long line storms. But Trapp’s team found this to be wrong, especially beyond the Alley. For example, about half of Indiana’s 20 tornadoes a year come from line storms. Nationwide, 79 percent of tornadoes arise out of cells, whereas 18 percent form from line storms, according to the study, which was supported by the National Science Foundation and reported in the February issue of the journal Weather and Forecasting.