Forty years of research and development by Lockheed Martin into harnessing energy from steep differentials in ocean temperatures will see its first commercial deployment in China. There, a resort developer has partnered with the U.S. defense and aerospace giant to build a 10-megawatt power plant using ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology.

The solar system that humans call home may be a strange oddity when compared with the incredible diversity of planetary systems researchers are discovering in the Milky Way, astronomers say.

Scientists now estimate the Milky Way galaxy contains at least as many planets as it does stars. So far, researchers have detected nearly 900 of these so-called exoplanets already, and several thousand more candidates are under investigation.

The oldest known hip from a great ape is now shedding light on the evolution of hominids, revealing the ancient creature may have adopted the upright posture often linked with humans and living great apes, researchers say.

Scientists discovered the fossil skeleton of an ape near Barcelona in Catalonia in northeastern Spain in 2002, when a bulldozer was clearing the land for digging. They named it Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, or the ape from near the village of Els Hostalets de Pierola in Catalonia.

Hidden beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England, archaeologists have discovered a 1,700-year-old Roman cemetery that seemed to show no religious bias.

The new discovery, found at the junction of Newarke and Oxford Streets, includes numerous burials and skeletal remains from 13 individuals, both male and female of various ages. The cemetery is estimated to date back to around A.D. 300, according to University of Leicester archaeologists who led the dig.

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.

Modern science and collective society are too quick to label cognitive conditions, and as a result, dismiss the potential for understanding and exploration. Parapsychological phenomena amongst savant syndrome individuals is a severely affected area. What is going on in the human mind when defects lead to brilliance?

In his blog, Paranormalia, Robert McLuhan explores the case of 9 year old Nandana, who has been diagnosed as a highly functioning child with Autism and ADHD, but is said to have a telepathic connection to her mother. Through a series of tests between mother and daughter, Nandana was able to type word for word a poem given initially only to her mom. She was also able to identify up to a nine digit number, as well as simple words and phrases.

In the very early hours of the morning, in a Harvard robotics laboratory last summer, an insect took flight. Half the size of a paperclip, weighing less than a tenth of a gram, it leapt a few inches, hovered for a moment on fragile, flapping wings, and then sped along a preset route through the air.

Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m. -- subject line, "Flight of the RoboBee.".

The Formosan clouded leopard, a clouded-leopard subspecies native to Taiwan, is now extinct, according to a team of zoologists.

"There is little chance that the clouded leopard still exists in Taiwan," zoologist Chiang Po-jen told Taiwan's Central News Agency (CNA). "There may be a few of them, but we do not think they exist in any significant numbers."

Zoologists from Taiwan and the United States have looked for the animal on and off since 2001, to no avail. To see if any of the animals remained, the researchers set up about 1,500 infrared cameras and scent traps in the Taiwanese mountains but found nothing.

When life gets messy, stress can make it hard to concentrate and keep a clear mind. But simply thinking about one's values can boost that problem-solving ability.

The findings, published today (May 1) in the journal PLOS ONE, suggest that thinking about what's important in life can essentially protect people from some of the corrosive effects of stress.

"Simply thinking about a value can completely ameliorate all these negative effects that stress can have on your problem-solving performance," said study co-author J. David Creswell, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University.

Pablo Picasso is widely regarded as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, having pioneered a variety of new styles in painting, sculpture, and other artistic forms. Besides introducing avant-garde art styles, he also innovated in the use of non-traditional materials. For example, a widely-held view has been that Picasso employed the ordinary house paint Ripolin in place of conventional artists' paints in some of his artwork. Over the years art historians have used different approaches in an attempt to determine which of Picasso's paintings incorporate Ripolin. This task is not as straightforward as one might suppose, because many of the ingredients in Ripolin were also present in the artists' paints used by Picasso.