SANTIAGO (Reuters) - Chileans' knowledge of earthquakes, combined with the abnormally long time it took for the February 27 quake to reach its crescendo, saved thousands of lives, a leading geophysicist said on Thursday.
Experts have been investigating why Chile's 8.8-magnitude quake, the world's fifth strongest recorded earthquake ...More
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Researchers in Japan have designed a super-elastic iron alloy which they hope can be used in sophisticated heart and brain surgeries and even buildings in earthquake zones.
In a paper published on Friday in the journal Science, the researchers said the metal's super-elasticity allows it to ...More
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Federal limits on water that can be pumped out of a major river delta for California farmers are scientifically justified, a much-anticipated report said on Friday, a finding hailed by environmentalists in the state's epic water wars.
But the National Academy of Sciences stopped short of ...More
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The estimated total cost of Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 fighter jets being bought by the Pentagon may be nearly twice as high as originally forecast, the Defense Department said Friday.
The bill for 2,443 F-35s is currently estimated at $278 billion to $329 billion, up from ...More
LONDON (Reuters) - German scientists have created a three-dimensional "invisibility cloak" that can hide objects by bending light waves.
The findings, published in the journal Science on Thursday, could in the future make it possible to make large objects invisible, but for now the researchers said they were not keen to ...More
MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian Soyuz space capsule carrying a U.S. astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut from the International Space Station landed safely in Kazakhstan on Thursday.
The capsule -- ferrying Expedition 22 Commander Jeff Williams and Flight Engineer Maxim Suraev -- landed in the vast steppe near the town of Arkalyk ...More
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - From French poodles to German shepherds, domestic dogs likely trace most of their ancestry to the Middle East, as opposed to East Asian origins suggested by previous research, a genetic study reported on Wednesday.
The findings, published in the online edition of the scientific journal Nature, support ...More
HONG KONG (Reuters) - Ancestors of a hobbit-like species of humans may have colonized the Indonesian island of Flores as far back as a million years ago, much earlier than thought, according to a new study published Thursday.
These early ancestors, or hominins, were previously thought to have arrived on the ...More
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - NASA Administrator Charles Bolden defended the U.S. space agency's budget on Tuesday and said its focus on commercial space transportation would provide "incredible opportunities" for U.S. companies.
"This budget is good for NASA because it sets the agency on a sustainable path that is tightly ...More
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Use of genetic screening on heart patients helped cut hospitalizations related to the widely used blood thinner warfarin by nearly a third, according to a large study that marks a step forward in the fledgling field of personalized medicine.
Researchers found that patients who received a test of ...More