You may recall reading a few weeks ago about a collection of Jurassic footprints so extensive it was being called a 'dinosaur dance floor' .   Another group of paleontologists visited the northern Arizona wilderness site and said it looked like a bunch of unusual potholes eroded in the sandstone to them.

So the scientist who leads the University of Utah's geology department says she will team up with the skeptics for a follow-up study.

If you've ever seen one of those "55 saves lives" signs you might wonder why we don't just lower the speed limit to 5MPH.   After all, it seems silly to think that lives lost from 56 miles and up are important but those below it are not.

General cynicism about advocates aside, it may be an issue of overestimating our abilities.     Whatever the cause, research suggests U.S. motorists are growing increasingly cynical about the relevance of speed limits, and a new study indicates many motorists are more likely to think they can drive safely while speeding - as long as they won't get caught.

A team of theoretical and experimental physicists  have designed a new black hole simulator called BlackMax to search for evidence that extra dimensions might exist in the universe. 

Black holes are theorized to be regions in space where the gravitational field is so strong that nothing can escape its pull after crossing what is called the event horizon. BlackMax simulates these regions. 

A two-year study conducted by researchers at George Mason University, INOVA Fairfax Hospital and the National Cancer Institute may open the door to new therapies for combating chronic diseases associated with obesity, a condition that affected more than 33 percent of American adults in 2005-06 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

While analyzing samples taken from morbidly obese patients undergoing weight loss surgery, the researchers discovered that substantial quantities of melanin—a pigment that gives the skin, the hair and the iris of the eye their natural color—were being produced in the study participants' fat tissue. 

Anyone who has wondered what it might be like to dive into a pool of millions of distant galaxies of different shapes and colours, will enjoy the latest image released by ESO. Obtained in part with the Very Large Telescope, the image is the deepest ground-based U-band image of the Universe ever obtained. It contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observations with the VIMOS instrument.

Chinese history is replete with the rise and fall of dynasties, but researchers now have identified a natural phenomenon that may have been the last straw for some of them: a weakening of the summer Asian Monsoons.   Such weakening accompanied the fall of three dynasties and now could be lessening precipitation in northern China.

Results of the study, led by researchers from the University of Minnesota and Lanzhou University in China, appear in this week's issue of Science.  The work rests on climate records preserved in the layers of stone in a 118-millimeter-long stalagmite found in Wanxiang Cave in Gansu Province, China.