AP - Tiny foreign mussels assault drinking water sources in California and Nevada. A deadly fish virus spreads swiftly through the Great Lakes and beyond. Japanese shore crabs make a home for themselves in Long Island Sound, more than 6,000 miles away. Read more…

AP - The FBI is investigating two bombings that targeted university scientists, the latest in a rash of attacks against biomedical researchers who experiment on animals, authorities say. Read more…

LiveScience.com - Deadly rogue waves 100 feet tall or higher could suddenly rise seemingly out of nowhere from the ocean, research now reveals. Read more…

Reuters - Tropical Storm Edouard moved across the northern Gulf of Mexico on Monday and has a 20 percent chance of hitting the Texas-Louisiana coast as a hurricane, U.S. forecasters said. Read more…

Reuters - Paleontologists digging in a brickyard in southern Poland have discovered the remains of a dinosaur they say is a previously unknown ancestor of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Read more…

AP - About 20 House Republicans have cut short their August vacations, gathering on the floor to protest Democratic energy policy and demand that Speaker Nancy Pelosi call lawmakers back into session to vote on an energy package. The bill would include GOP demands for more domestic drilling. Read more…

That's the nocturnal Kakapo in the photograph on the right. The Kakapo probably recognizes the fruit it eats according to the fruit's aroma. The Kakapo was one of the birds that was part of a recent research project that determined that birds likely have a much more developed sense of smell than was previously thought. The study by Silke Steiger (Max Planck Institute for Ornithology) and her colleagues found that the sense of smell may be as important to our feathered friends as it is to fish or mammals. Recent behavioural studies have shown that some bird species use their sense of smell to navigate, forage or even to distinguish individual birds. Silke Steiger and her research team focused on the olfactory receptor (OR) genes in their study. The total number of thse OR genes in a genome may reflect how many different scents an animal can detect or distinguish. The researchers compared the OR genes of the chicken as well as eight distantly related bird species. They estimated the total number of OR genes in each species' genome using a statistical technique adapted from ecological studies where it is used to estimate species diversity. They found considerable differences in OR gene number between the nine bird species. The brown kiwi from New Zealand, for example, has about six times more OR genes than the blue tit or canary. "When we looked up the relative sizes of the olfactory bulb in the brain, we also noticed similar big differences between species," said Steiger. "It is likely that the number of OR genes correlates with the number of different smells that can be perceived. As the olfactory bulb is responsible for processing olfactory information, we were not too surprised to see that the number of genes is linked to the size of the olfactory bulb." Another finding from the research was that a large majority of the OR genes in birds are functional. By comparison human have a poor sense of smell and only about 40% of human OR genes are thought to be functional. The researchers also found a new class of OR genes that exists in birds but does not present itself in mammals or fish. You can read more about the study here on RedOrbit.com. Photo credit: Don Merton Permalink | Recent Headlines | News Feeds Read more…

AP - A chunk of ice spreading across seven square miles has broken off a Canadian ice shelf in the Arctic, scientists said Tuesday. Read more…

AP - This isn't how a jet pack is supposed to look, is it? Hollywood has envisioned jet packs as upside-down fire extinguishers strapped to people's backs. But Glenn Martin's invention is far more unwieldy — a 250-pound piano-sized contraption that people settle into rather than strap on. Read more…

LiveScience.com - As if the San Andreas Fault weren't long and menacing enough, newly found mud pots and mud volcanoes now suggest it extends another 18 miles, going under the Salton Sea and beyond, in the desert southeast of Palm Springs. Read more…