Terrorists are leveraging information technology to learn how to create devastating weapons cheaply and quickly - and the West is now having to learn to keep up.

Since the start of the Iraq War, improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have accounted for nearly half of the combat deaths reported by U.S. coalition forces. The death toll underscores a grim paradox of the ongoing conflict: during the last four and a half years the United States and its allies have fielded the most advanced and complex weaponry ever developed, but egg timers and toy remote controls in the hands of knowledgeable terrorists can do just as much damage.

Military analysts and counterterrorism experts say that this war is radically different from previous ones and must be thought of in an entirely new light.

The Mandala is a detailed sand representation of the residence of the Medicine Buddha and one will be constructed by Tibetan monks over four days in Paris while simultaneously being displayed virtually in Second Life.

This confluence of technology and religion will get the message out about the situation in Burma, according to members of the Mind Science Institute and executives at a London think tank called Unfrozenmind, who have collaborated on the Second Life simulcast of the actual event.

Not everyone - okay, no one outside the Chinese government - is all that happy about things in Burma these days so they believe this will promote awareness of the situation there and aid Monks and Nuns of Burma in their efforts at independence.

Groundbreaking - and heartwarmingly unessential - research done by University of Central Florida physics professor Costas Efthimiou has attempted to confirm what a generation of suicide girls has always feared - that vampires do not exist.

His reasoning? On Jan 1, 1600, the human population was just over 530 million people.

In animals with separate sexes, embryos commit to becoming male or female at an early stage. Often this key decision is made by sex determination genes on the sex chromosomes.

The genes involved in sexual development have changed remarkably little during evolution. In contrast, the sex determination genes and the sex chromosomes themselves are among the most rapidly changing features of the genome.

A research team formed by Sander van Doorn (Santa Fe Institute, USA) and Mark Kirkpatrick (University of Texas at Austin, USA) suggests an answer to the puzzle of why sex chromosomes evolve so rapidly. In a theoretical study published in the October 17, 2007 issue of NATURE they demonstrate that sexual conflict can establish novel sex-determining genes and sex chromosomes.

This animation, comprised of images acquired by Envisat’s Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) instrument, shows the breaking away of a giant iceberg from the Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica. Spanning 34 km in length by 20 km in width, the new iceberg covers an area nearly half the size of Greater London.

The animation highlights the movement in the area between September 2006 and October 2007. The Pine Island Glacier is visible stretching from the right of the image to the centre. The tongue of Pine Island is shown moving inland between September 2006 and March 2007. Between April and May 2007, the detached iceberg in front of Pine Island moves significantly. Also in May 2007, a crack in Pine Island becomes visible. By October, the new iceberg has completely broken away.

The first fossil tracks belonging to large, carnivorous dinosaurs discovered in Victoria, Australia show that large dinosaurs were living in a polar environment during the Cretaceous Period, when Australia was still joined to Antarctica and close to the South Pole.

The find is being reported today, Friday, Oct. 19, at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Austin, Texas, by Anthony Martin, senior lecturer in environmental studies at Emory.

Antimatter is made up of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is made up of particles.

Antihydrogen, for instance, is the simplest atom comprised entirely of antiparticles, with an antiproton as a nucleus and a positron in place of the electron normally found in ordinary hydrogen.

Now a Swansea University physicist is leading a project worth more than £835,000, which could change our understanding of the structure of the Universe. Professor Mike Charlton has been awarded a five-year Senior Research Fellowship by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The Fellowship will now enable him to dedicate his time entirely to research, and the project’s aim is to make the first measurements of the properties of antimatter.

Are you happy? Well don't try to be happier; you might become less happy. That is the gist of a multi-cultural study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study by University of Virginia psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues at three other institutions found that, on average, European-Americans claim to be happy in general – more happy than Asian-Americans or Koreans or Japanese – but are more easily made less happy by negative events, and recover at a slower rate from negative events, than their counterparts in Asia or with an Asian ancestry.

In the October 19, 2007, issue of PLoS-Genetics, a team of academic and commercial researchers (1) show that their "maize mini-chromosomes" (MMC) can introduce an entire "cassette" of novel genes into a plant in a way that is structurally stable and functional. Early results, the study authors say, "suggest that the MMC could be maintained indefinitely."

The production of transgenic plants, including maize, has historically relied on techniques that integrate DNA fragments into a host chromosome. This can disrupt important native genes or lead to limited or unregulated expression of the added gene.

Currently, to add a single gene, plant scientists create hundreds of transgenic plants in which the new gene is randomly inserted into a plant chromosome.