Research by the University of Warwick shows how death gave birth to the modern cult of celebrity as the sudden rise in the popularity of obituaries of unusual people in the 1700s provided people with the 18th Century equivalent of a celebrity gossip magazine. 

The skeleton of a 12,000 year-old Natufian Shaman has been discovered in northern Israel by archaeologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The burial is described as being accompanied by "exceptional" grave offerings - including 50 complete tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard and a human foot. The shaman burial is thought to be one of the earliest known from the archaeological record and the only shaman grave in the whole region.

A VHF radio interferometer system that was designed by Zhang GuangShu, et al of Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute at Chinese Academy of Sciences was used to observe a cloud-to-ground lightning flash containing 19 strokes , revealing new characteristics of lightning.

The system in this study has five antennas that form an array in orthogonal directions, and an interactive graphic analysis procedure is used to remove the fringe ambiguities. The system error, which comes from frequency conversion, is reduced by phase detection through direct high frequency amplifying. By using the system, the whole progression process in time and space of a lightning flash can be continuously reconstructed at microsecond orders.

Yesterday, following a fifth orbit-raising maneuver, the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft successfully settled into a trajectory that will take it to the Moon.  After launch on 22 October, the spacecraft was first injected into an elliptical 7-hr orbit around Earth, between 255 km and 22 860 km above our planet. After five engine firings, Chandrayaan-1 spiralled outwards in increasingly elongated ellipses around Earth, until it reached its lunar transfer orbit on 4 November at 00:26 CET (04:56 Indian standard time).  

In the fifth and last orbit-raising maneuver, the spacecraft’s 440 Newton liquid-fuel propelled engine was fired for about two and a half minutes. The lunar transfer orbit’s farthest point from Earth is about 380 000 km. 

It took less than a decade for native rats to become extinct on the Indian Ocean's previously uninhabited Christmas Island once Eurasian black rats jumped ship onto the island at the turn of the 20th century.

But this story is more than the typical tale of direct competition: according to new genetic research published in PLoS One, black rats carried a pathogen that exterminated two endemic species, Rattus macleari and R. nativitatis. This study is the first to demonstrate extinction in a mammal because of disease, supporting the hypothesis proposed a decade ago that "hyperdisease conditions"—unusually rapid mortality from which a species never recovers—can lead to extinction. 

Any time science  terms become colloquial, it leads to problems.    How often does someone make a speculation and call it a 'theory'?   Cars supposedly 'evolve' if their advertising is true.    And 'junk DNA' means 'useless' if you ask many outside biology.   

But 'junk' DNA does not mean 'no value' and a new paper published in Genome Research on Nov. 4 reaffirm that.  Scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) report that what was previously believed to be "junk" DNA is one of the important ingredients distinguishing humans from other species.