Far above Antarctica, 120,000 feet and more, near the very top of the atmosphere, three enormous balloons float, each large enough to hold a major league baseball field. Forty million cubic feet of low pressure helium – enough to loft 3 tons of scientific equipment over 3 times as high as Cosmic-Ray Research Above Antarctica most modern airliners fly. How did they get there? More importantly, what on Earth for?

The creatures living in the depths of the ocean are as weird and outlandish as the creations in a Dr. Seuss book: tentacled transparent sea cucumbers, primitive "dumbos" that flap ear-like fins, and tubeworms that feed on oil deposits.
A report released Sunday recorded 17,650 species living below 656 feet, the point where sunlight ceases. The [...]

The remains of one of the earliest modern humans to inhabit eastern Asia have been unearthed in a cave in China.

A vast pool of molten rock in the continental crust that underlies southwestern Washington state could supply magma to three active volcanoes in the Cascade Mountains — Mount St. Helens , Mount Rainier and Mount Adams — according to a new study that’s causing a stir among scientists.

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data. Originally, barcodes represented data in the widths (lines) and the spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1D (1 dimensional) barcodes or symbologies. They also come in patterns of squares, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns within images termed 2D (2 dimensional) matrix codes or symbologies.

THE discovery of extrasolar super-Earths – rocky planets about five to ten times the mass of Earth – has raised hopes that some may harbour life. Perhaps it’s a vain hope though, since it now seems that Earth is just the right size to sustain life.
Life is comfortable on Earth in part because of its [...]

Single mother travelled to Panama for operation to turn brown eyes blue… and was almost blinded

We tend to hold inventors in high esteem, but often their discoveries were the result of an accident or twist of fate. This is true of many everyday items, including the following surprise inventions.

An unusual celestial vanishing act will take place the night of Sept. 2 when all four of Jupiter’s largest moons will be hidden from our view.
The event will occur on a night when Jupiter happens to be positioned very close to Earth’s moon in the southeastern sky. The two objects, though very far apart in [...]

Is a world population of 6 billion too many? Compare that with animals. There are more than a million animal species. There are 6,000 species of reptiles, 73,000 kinds of spiders, and 3,000 types of lice. For each person [...]