Exoplanets - planets around stars other than the sun - were discovered almost 20 years ago,but for the first time, X-ray observations have detected an exoplanet passing in front of its parent star.

An advantageous alignment of a planet and its parent star in the system HD 189733, 63 light-years from Earth, has enabled NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM Newton Observatory to observe a dip in X-ray intensity as the planet transited the star.

The planet, known as HD 189733b, is a hot Jupiter, meaning it is similar in size to Jupiter in our solar system but in very close orbit around its star. HD 189733b is more than 30 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun. It orbits the star once every 2.2 days.

In what the authors are calling perhaps the most comprehensive and definitive effort to date, zoologists say they have explained the processes that drove male mammals to adopt social monogamy as a breeding strategy. 

Because male mammals have a much higher potential to produce offspring in a single breeding season than do their female counterparts (who must endure long gestation periods), it would seem that mating with one female per cycle would be limiting. Yet a percentage of mammalian males do this -- and researchers have debated why, seeking to identify selective advantages social monogamy offers, for decades.

There's still no free lunch. Finite budgets based on taxes that give equal treatment to everyone aren't really resulting in equal quality. Instead, most ward nurses in NHS hospitals say they are forced to ration care, or not complete certain aspects of it — including adequate monitoring of patients — because they don't have enough time, indicates a new paper.

If you talk to someone who knows food but not science, it won't be long before some jab at Monsanto issues forth. And if you persist in discussing biology, it really won't be long before you get called a shill for Monsanto.

You don't have to use biology, you could also do the same social experiment using energy or medicine, if your test is for left-wing people, or global warming, if you want to see the right go into a tirade about science. 

New biological insecticides, which make use of “entomopathogenic” viruses that are harmful to insects, have emerged in recent years. The big advantage versus regular pesticides is that they are innocuous to man, vertebrae and plants, and environmental activists have not heard of them yet. Each viral strain attacks a very limited number of insect species.

The baculovirus is frequently studied and to identify the virus in this family that will most effectively control the Guatemalan potato moth, a French-Ecuadorian research team from Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD) has analyzed the pathogens among moths from all over the world.  

2 000 years ago, Roman fishermen knew that some species of fish liked to gather under floating objects.

No one knew why and it didn't matter, that behavioral mechanism was just used to catch more fish in the Mediterranean. Today, artisanal and industrial tuna fisheries exploit this “aggregating phenomenon” in much the same way. Over the last thirty years, seine fishing in particular has developed rapidly through the use of massive floating objects, natural at first, then more recently fish aggregation devices (FADs) remotely monitored using electronic beacons. 

These floating objects help enable 40 % of worldwide tropical tuna catches today.

In J.R.R. Tolkeins's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings", a hobbit discovers a giant in the caves under Mt. Doom.

More recently, another famous hobbit helped discover a much smaller kind of spider. And the researchers who get credit for it named Ctenus monaghani after him.

Actor Dominic Monaghan, who played  Hobbit Meriadoc “Merry” Brandybock in the recent motion picture trilogy, has a new nature documentary called “Wild Things” and Dr. Peter Jäger, expert consultant to the “Wild Things” team in the forests and caves of Laos, discovered the new, eight-legged critter and named it after the actor in recognition of Monaghan's natural world enthusiasm, which even extends to inconspicuous and unpopular animals such as spiders.

A year-round ice-free Arctic Ocean surface could explain why the Earth of the Pliocene Epoch had the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that we have today, but we remain 3 to 9 degrees cooler than the Earth was then.

At a young age, kids learn that the cookies are still there, even though they have been placed in a jar. And they learn that a car driven into a tunnel will reappear on the other side. 

The ability to represent and to track the trajectory of objects which are temporally out of sight is important in many aspects - and also cognitively demanding. In non-human primates, only the great apes have shown convincing abilities there.

Alice Auersperg and her team from the University of Vienna and Oxford have shown that "object permanence" abilities in the Goffin Cockatoo (Cacatua goffini) equals apes and four year old human toddlers. 

A new solar cell and a photo anode made of a metal oxide has resulted in storing nearly five percent of solar energy chemically, in the form of hydrogen.

The solar cell is simpler than that of traditional high-efficiency triple-junction cells based on amorphous silicon or expensive III-V semiconductors.