Science News

Like sprinklers hidden beneath the surface, a series of geysers - more than previously thought - are gushing water ice from fissures near the south pole of Saturns icy moon Enceladus, new images reveal.

The new images were taken during Cassinis flyby on Nov. 21, 2009, and include the best 3-D look ever obtained of a “tiger stripe” - a fissure that sprays icy particles, water vapor and organic compounds.

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BLOOM BOX: Bloom Energy is a secretive Silicon Valley startup that is working on a new way to produce cleaner energy. Its first product is a huge box of fuel cells that it hopes will allow homes and businesses to generate their own electricity.

POTENTIAL PITFALLS: Analysts warn that the technology has yet to be widely proven, and that little is still publicly known about the long-term costs of owning a Bloom Box.

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Small domesticated dogs probably originated in the Middle East more than 12,000 years ago as the descendants of grey wolves, according to a gene study published on Wednesday.

“(The variant) probably arose early in their history,” said Gray, whose paper is published online by BMC Biology, an open-access journal.

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A secretive Silicon Valley startup working on a new way to produce cleaner energy is taking the wraps off its product: a huge box of fuel cells that it hopes will allow homes and businesses to generate their own electricity.

Yet analysts warn that the technology has yet to be widely proven.

The technology from Bloom Energy, already used at major companies such as Google Inc.

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Many of our galaxys star clusters may actually foreigners: collections of stars that were born elsewhere and then migrated to our Milky Way, according to a new study.

“It turns out that many of the stars and globular star clusters we see when we look into the night sky are not natives, but aliens from other galaxies,” said study co-author Duncan Forbes, an astronomer from Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

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It has been just under seven years since the iTunes store started selling music. Since that time, the iPod and iTunes have overtaken and revolutionized the portable music business and sold a boatload of songs. In fact, Apple is on track to hit the 10 billion downloads mark tomorrow.

Of course, that doesnt take into account the possible acceleration of downloads over the next 24 hours.

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Fossils of a previously undiscovered species of dinosaur have been found in slabs of Utah sandstone that were so hard that explosives had to be used to free some of the remains, scientists said Tuesday. The bones found at Dinosaur National Monument belonged to a type of sauropod - long-necked plant-eaters that were said to be the largest animal ever to roam land.

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A moms wise words about chewing your food likely got lost on a giant, long-necked dinosaur that lived about 105 million years ago in North America. Thats according to analyses of four skulls from a newly identified dinosaur species.

Paleontologists discovered the four skulls, two of which whose bones were fully intact, from a quarry in Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah.

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Senator John Kerry vowed Tuesday to overcome the odds and approve US action to curb carbon emissions, raising the specter of millions of refugees unless climate change is addressed.

“Im excited. I know thats completely contrary to any conventional wisdom,” Kerry said.

While offering no timetable, the ally of President Barack Obama rejected predictions that Senate approval of a climate bill — which would offer a boon to troubled talks on a new global treaty — had become politically impossible.

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NASAs space shuttle Discovery moved a step closer to a planned April 5 launch Monday, a day after its sister ship Endeavour returned to Earth from its own space mission.

NASA is preparing Discovery to launch the STS-131 mission to the International Space Station to deliver new science equipment and spare parts.

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