The crashing of the enormous fluked tail on the surface of the ocean is a “calling card” of modern whales.

Living whales have no back legs and use their front legs as 'flippers' that allow them to steer. Their tails provide the powerful thrust necessary to move their huge bulk.

Yet this has not always been the case, according to research in the latest issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Paleontologist Mark D. Uhen of the Alabama Museum of Natural History describes new fossils from Alabama and Mississippi that pinpoint where tail flukes developed in the evolution of whales.

Almost every bad thing a teenager does gets attributed to the 'crowd' they hang out with - few parents confess to having the troublemaker kid. Now an RTI International researcher says that goes for weight gain in kids too.

It isn't your fault for letting them eat junk food; it's their friends, for also being overweight.

The study, published in the September issue of Journal of Health Economics says that friends' weight is correlated with an adolescent’s own weight even after considering demographics, smoking status, birth weight, and household characteristics such as parental obesity.

Fort Miami wasn't a fort at all, according to discoveries made this summer by members of the University of Cincinnati's Ohio Valley Archaeology Field School project, who spent weeks working at the site in Hamilton County's Shawnee Lookout park.

What they found actually offers great insight into the cultural priorities of the Shawnee – the human labor that went into building the earthworks were done for agricultural purposes, not military. The earthworks were not a fort, but a water management system of dams and canals built to counter the impact of long-term drought.

It is also much larger than previously believed – so large, in fact, that its berms stretch to almost six kilometers in length, making it twice as large as any other Native American earthworks in Ohio, and one of the largest in the nation.

The phenomenon of "shimmering" in giant honeybees, in which hundreds or even thousands of individual honeybees flip their abdomens upwards within a split-second to produce a Mexican Wave-like ("Mexican Wave" is British English for what Americans just call "the wave" - when fans in sections of the stadium stand up in sequence to cheer) pattern across the bee nest, has received much interest but both its precise mode of action and its purpose have long remained a mystery.

In a new study published this week, researchers at the University of Graz, Austria, and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, UK, report the finding that shimmering—a remarkable capacity of rapid communication in giant honeybees—acts as a defensive mechanism, which repels predatory hornets, forcing them to hunt free-flying bees, further afield, rather than foraging bees directly from the honeybee nest.

Endeavour International Corporation today announced a discovery at the site of its Noatun C prospect located in PL107 in the Norwegian North Sea. The well encountered a gas condensate column in the targeted Middle to Lower Jurassic sandstone. The drilling of a sidetrack will begin immediately to locate the gas water contact and further determine the size of the discovery.

The Noatun C was drilled to a total depth of 5,110 meters (16,765 feet) below sea level in approximately 293 meters (958 feet) of water. Logging and formation tests confirm the presence of gas condensate. The prospect is one of several satellites to be drilled by Endeavour and the operator StatoilHydro as potential tie backs to the Njord field that lies 16 kilometers south of the discovery. Two well bores, a discovery well and an appraisal well, drilled during the second quarter of 2008 at the Galtvort prospect in PL348 also encountered gas condensate. These successes followed a gas condensate discovery in late 2007 at the Njord Northwest Flank prospect west of the Njord field in PL107. Endeavour holds a 2.5 percent equity interest in the Noatun, Galtvort, and the Njord Northwest Flank discoveries and the Njord field.

Brage Satellites

Children who wear glasses are being bullied at school, to the extent that some play truant to avoid playground taunts - and it's because of the glasses, not because some kids are just not cool, says Specsavers.

Research commissioned by them to mark the inaugural National Glasses Day on Friday September 19th reveals that a quarter of children were sad when they were told that they had to wear specs.

Being told 'Johnny Depp wears glasses' did not seem to help so Specsavers has commissioned iconic specs wearer Gok Wan, presenter of C4's "How to Look Good Naked", and anti-bullying charity Kidscape to encourage all specs wearers to wear their glasses with pride and draw attention to bullies who ridicule people because of how they look.