Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, authors of Who Built The Moon will be with us in our Author Of The Month messageboard throughout January to discuss their latest book featured in our most recent Forum Article

A series of solar eclipse—on 2006, 2008, and 2009—have allowed scientist to take these beautiful images of the Sun's corona, the first ones in history that show a phenomenon called the Iron Line.

The iron line is made of highly ionized iron, called Fe XI 789.2 nm. The iron spewing reaches an extremely far distance—an amazing three times the solar radii—and has regions in which there is quite a higher iron concentration than in others.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93.

Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.

When it comes to choosing a mate, female toads may have more control than previously thought, say scientists.

A report in the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal describes how a female cane toad inflates its body to prevent an amorous male from mating with it.

This makes it difficult for the male toad to "hold on".

A young American adventurer, 17-year-old Katie Spotz, has started rowing across the Atlantic Ocean in a solo effort to raise $30,000 for Blue Planet Run and give clean water to 1,000 people in developing nations. The young sailor pushed off from Senegal yesterday and hopes to make the 2,500-mile journey in just over 100 days.The map above shows her progress up until now (updated every 20 minutes on her twitter page by Google Earth).

Mount Sceberras, the hill on which Valletta was built, was not barren wasteland but served as agricultural land in medieval times, according to new archaeological evidence.

New evidence that the hill was the site of “intense, ancient and medieval agricultural occupation” challenged the often-repeated theory that Mount Sceberras was barren and rocky, architect and Valletta Rehabilitation Project CEO Claude Borg said.

SAN ANDREAS - Hundreds of basins carved into a football field-sized granite ledge in a remote Sierra Nevada wilderness are the remains of what may be the oldest manufacturing operation in North America, according to a U.S. Geological Survey study whose results were released in December.

The researchers concluded that the more than 350 basins three to four feet in diameter were used to evaporate salt from the briny flow of a nearby spring.

Opening a new chapter in planet hunting, NASA scientists reported Monday the discovery of five worlds orbiting nearby stars, using the space agency's Kepler space telescope.

Kepler science team leader William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., made the announcement of the "roaster" planets, ones larger than Neptune and orbiting extremely close to their stars, at the American Astronomical Society annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Launched last year, the $591 million Kepler eyeballs some 156,000 stars within 3,000 light years of Earth for planets, according to a study in the upcoming Science journal. One light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.

OMAHA, Neb. – Native American tribes tired of waiting for the U.S. government to honor centuries-old treaties are buying back land where their ancestors lived and putting it in federal trust.

Native Americans say the purchases will help protect their culture and way of life by preserving burial grounds and areas where sacred rituals are held. They also provide land for farming, timber and other efforts to make the tribes self-sustaining.

Each Christmas, Christians tell stories about the poor baby Jesus born in a lowly manger because there was no room in the inn.

But the Rev. C. Thomas Anderson, senior pastor of the Living Word Bible Church in Mesa, Arizona, preaches a version of the Christmas story that says baby Jesus wasn't so poor after all.

Anderson says Jesus couldn't have been poor because he received lucrative gifts -- gold, frankincense and myrrh -- at birth. Jesus had to be wealthy because the Roman soldiers who crucified him gambled for his expensive undergarments. Even Jesus' parents, Mary and Joseph, lived and traveled in style, he says.

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese and Chinese scholars have failed to narrow their differences over modern history, including the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, during a joint study that aimed to soothe strained ties.

Ten scholars from each country took part in the three-year project to review history from medieval through modern times.

Scientists at The University of Nottingham have found that a group of genetic rogue elements, produced by DNA sequences commonly known as 'junk DNA', could help diagnose breast and bowel cancer. Their research, funded by Cancer Research UK, is published in this month's Genomics journal.

The researchers, led by Dr Cristina Tufarelli, in the School of Graduate Entry Medicine and Health Sciences, discovered that seven of these faulty genetic elements -- known as chimeric transcripts -- are more common in breast cancer cells. Five were only present in breast cancer cells while two were found in both normal and breast cancer cells.

SALT LAKE CITY — An agreement to protect a central Utah canyon rich with ancient American Indian art while allowing for nearby mineral development has been approved.

WASHINGTON – Girls around the world are not worse at math than boys, even though boys are more confident in their math abilities, and girls from countries where gender equity is more prevalent are more likely to perform better on mathematics assessment tests, according to a new analysis of international research.

As the 1970s Jerry Reed pop song went: "When you're hot, you’re hot!" But a planet? Not!

That’s the story from this week's American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington D.C. where astronomers reported that NASA's Kepler planet-hunting observatory has found two normal stars orbited by objects that are too blistering hot to be planets but too small to be stars.

So what are they? It's anybody's guess. They're simply called "objects of interest" by the Kepler team.

The Kepler space telescope is monitoring the light from 100,000 stars to search for planets that briefly pass in front of their stars.

A rare textile woven from the silk of more than one million spiders is currently on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The incredible textile measures 11 by four feet, and is the largest piece of spider-woven textile in the world.

Woven by golden orb spiders from Madagascar, the project took 70 people four years to collect enough spiders (not to mention the dozen people who spent 4 years extracting 80 feet of silk filament from each arachnid).

WASHINGTON – NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has found two mystery objects that are too hot to be planets and too small to be stars.

The Kepler Telescope, launched in March, discovered the two new heavenly bodies, each circling its own star. Telescope chief scientist Bill Borucki of NASA said the objects are thousands of degrees hotter than the stars they circle. That means they probably aren't planets. They are bigger and hotter than planets in our solar system, including dwarf planets.

Researchers have new insight into the sex lives of the much-maligned mosquitoes that are responsible for the vast majority of malaria deaths, according to a report published online on December 31st in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

In finding a partner of the right species type, male and female mosquitoes depend on their ability to "sing" in perfect harmony. Those tones are produced and varied based on the frequency of their wing beats in flight.

The earliest reference we have to unusual animal behavior prior to a significant earthquake is from Greece in 373 BC. Rates, weasels, snakes, and centipedes reportedly left their homes and headed for safety several days befor a destructive earthquake. Anectdotal evidence abounds of animals, fish, birds, reptiles, and insects exhibiting strange behavior anywhere from weeks to seconds before an earthquake. However, consistent and reliable behavior prior to seismic events, and a mechanism explaining how it could work, still eludes us. Most, but not all, scientists pursuing this mystery are in China or Japan.

Though my farm-raised father insists differently, there’s something a bit spooky about cows standing in a field. They’re just a bit too placid; I’ve always suspected that those limpid eyes hide strange secrets.

And what do you know — I was right! German and Czech biologists have shown that cattle, along with deer, instinctively stand in a north-south direction. They appear to possess a sixth sense of magnetism.