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WASHINGTON - Will you walk into my parlor, said a Cretaceous spider to an ancient fly. The classic spider's web, like Charlotte would have woven, was invented just once, way back in the Cretaceous period some 136 million years ago, scientists report. Called an orb web, it's the generally circular style spun by two major types of spiders, which had raised the possibility of the two groups evolving this form separately. But a paper in Friday's issue of the journal Science says a comparison of the spider genes related to web making shows that the orb web developed just...

IQALUIT, Nunavut - Northern hunters, scientists and people with vivid imaginations have discussed the possibility for years. But Roger Kuptana, an Inuvialuit guide from Sachs Harbour, Northwest Territories, was the first to suspect it had actually happened when he proposed that a strange-looking bear shot last month by an American sports hunter might be half polar bear, half grizzly. Territorial officials seized the creature after noticing its white fur was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly. Now a DNA test has confirmed that it is indeed a hybrid -...

This image provided by the journal Science shows a Castorcauda lustrasimilis, a docodont mammaliaform from the Middle Jurrassic .Characterized by an evolutionary convergence of its "beaver-like" tail, and some dental feautres for feeding small fish and invertebrates convergent to that of an otter. MARK A. KLINGER WASHINGTON - The discovery of a furry, beaver-like animal that lived at the time of dinosaurs has overturned more than a century of scientific thinking about Jurassic mammals. The find shows that the ecological role of mammals in the time of dinosaurs was far greater than previously thought, said Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of...

GLYNDON, Md. -- The mystery may be over as one of the creatures roaming through central Maryland was finally captured on Saturday. According to the veterinarians at Falls Road Animal Hospital, the animal was a male red fox. However, Dr. Michael Herko -- a vet at the animal hospital -- and the man who caught the fox say it is not the mysterious creature videotaped in July, but a relative. Jay Wroe set a trap in his back yard after videotaping an animal that was roaming around. It was an animal he could not immediately identify. The humane trap paid...

Families of Sept.11 Victims Say They Want Honesty, Admissions from Administration W A S H I N G T O N, D.C., April 8 — With the Sept. 11 commission pressing its investigation of the terror attacks, families of the victims say they want someone inside the Bush administration to admit fault as a show of loyalty to the American people. "We need an admission that mistakes were made," said Beverly Eckert, widowed on Sept. 11 and now a member of a victims' family steering committee.

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) - USA Today said Friday that an examination of the work of journalist Jack Kelley found strong evidence that the newspaper's former star foreign correspondent had fabricated substantial portions of at least eight major stories. "As an institution, we failed our readers by not recognizing Jack Kelley's problems. For that I apologize," publisher Craig Moon said. After spending seven weeks closely examining Kelley's work, a team of journalists also found that Kelley had lifted quotes or other material from competing publications, lied in speeches he delivered for USA Today and conspired to mislead the investigation into his...

Probable Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry will likely face a challenge on the left from Ralph Nader soon, but 32 years ago, Kerry showered his possible electoral spoiler with praise in a speech at the College. Kerry implored Dartmouth students "to be their own Ralph Nader" in opposing the Vietnam War, urging the audience to "break the cycle of non-involvement." Kerry, who had recently served as president of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, spoke on Jan. 10, 1972 at the Top of the Hop, where he urged students and Americans who opposed the Vietnam War to involve themselves in...

Columbia grad denies romantic link to Kerry (Skipping the old and cutting straight to the new...) Alexandra Polier's only known ties to Kerry are through a top aide, campaign finance director Peter Maroney. A Columbia University classmate of Polier told The News that Maroney introduced her to Kerry in 2001 at an economic summit in Switzerland. "She met with [Kerry] again when the forum came to New York in 2002," the classmate said. Maroney could not be reached for comment yesterday. A Republican political strategist said Kerry has not been hurt by the fallout. "It looks like it's going away,"...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Forget the movie, Cecilia Bartoli says. Antonio Salieri isn't the bad guy who poisoned Mozart. He's an underappreciated genius who paved the path for Beethoven. Following hit recordings of works by Vivaldi and Gluck, Bartoli is touring the United States to support her latest project, "The Salieri Album," which contains 13 arias from the seldom-heard composer. Some of the pieces were so obscure that they had to be found in a Vienna library -- only two of the arias had ever been recorded.

Fears are growing that a serial killer has murdered 12 men, hidden their bodies and assumed their identities, police have revealed. Detectives believe the killer followed the pattern of The Talented Mr Ripley, the character portrayed on film by Matt Damon, who murdered a friend and took over his victim's wealth and his life. A major search has been launched for 11 missing men after blood was found at the home of a retired librarian. The 63-year-old is believed to have been dismembered and dumped elsewhere. Then, it is alleged, the killer assumed his identity to plunder more than £30,000...

New pterosaur fossils and studies are revealing just how unusual these huge, flying reptiles from the dinosaur era were. Based on current findings, many pterosaurs, which lived on nearly every continent during the Mesozoic Era from approximately 248 million to 65 million years ago, possessed tweezer-like heads, body fur and incredibly large, varied head crests. The recent discoveries, outlined in the current issue of Biologist, also suggest that pterosaurs walked on four limbs instead of two, as previously believed. Paleontologists have struggled with this issue, due to the bat-like way the flying reptile's wings were attached to its fore-limbs and...

When People Fled Hyenas By Lee Dye Special to ABCNEWS.com Nov. 20 — Deep inside a cave in Siberia's Altai Mountains, Christy Turner and his Russian colleagues may have found an answer to a question that has hounded him for more than three decades. As a young anthropologist, Turner spent time in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in the 1970s, working at several archaeological sites and occasionally gazing westward toward Siberia. "I thought, 'That's the place that Native Americans came from,' " he says now from his laboratory at Arizona State University in Tempe. But why, he wondered then as he still...

Exclusive from New Scientist Hidden extra dimensions are causing measurements of the strength of gravity at different locations on Earth to be affected by the planet's magnetic field, French researchers say. This is a controversial claim because no one has ever provided experimental evidence to support either the existence of extra dimensions or any interaction between gravity and electromagnetism. But lab measurements of Newton's gravitational constant G suggest that both are real. Newton's constant, which describes the strength of the gravitational pull that bodies exert on each other, is the most poorly determined of the constants of nature. The two...

Exclusive from New Scientist A self-organising electronic circuit has stunned engineers by turning itself into a radio receiver. What should have been an oscillator became a radio This accidental reinvention of the radio followed an experiment to see if an automated design process, that uses an evolutionary computer program, could be used to "breed" an electronic circuit called an oscillator. An oscillator produces a repetitive electronic signal, usually in the form of a sine wave. Paul Layzell and Jon Bird at the University of Sussex in Brighton applied the program to a simple arrangement of transistors and found that an...

WOOMERA, South Australia (Reuters) - A test launch of what Japanese scientists hope will be the next generation of supersonic jet failed spectacularly Sunday in the Australian desert. The superjet, a 1:10 scale model of a plane that would be able to fly twice as fast as the Concorde, dived into the ground shortly after take-off at a long-abandoned British rocket testing range in South Australia, a Reuters photographer on the scene said. "It spiraled in the sky and then crashed into the ground in flames," photographer Mark Baker said. The rocket-propelled almost 38-foot model piggy-backed on an almost...

DALLAS, May 16 (UPI) -- Scientists believe they have discovered precisely how a high-fat diet can lead to the development of colon cancer. Reporting in Friday's issue of the journal Science, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center said the vitamin D receptor, which is found on the surface of cells in the colon and normally binds vitamin D, also binds with and neutralizes a toxic chemical known to cause colon cancer. David Mangelsdorf, principal investigator of the study and a pharmacologist at UT's Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told United Press International the toxic chemical is called lithocholic...

KABUL, Afghanistan (news - web sites) (AP) - The intelligence chief of Afghanistan's deposed Taliban militia died in American bombardment in the eastern part of the country last week, a government official confirmed Wednesday. Qari Ahmadullah was among 25 people killed in Naka, in the eastern Afghan province of Paktika, on Dec. 27 when U.S. planes attacked a house where he was staying with his associates, the Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press agency reported. In Kabul, Abdullah Tawheedi, a deputy intelligence minister for the interim government, confirmed the death to The Associated Press. The rest of the article.

<p>WASHINGTON -- Scientists have invented the tiniest transistor that may ever be possible -- using only a single molecule.</p> <p>Bell Labs' organic nanotransistor, about 10 million of which can fit on the head of a pin, could be used to fit lightning-fast computers on clothes and paper and otherwise revolutionize technology as we know it.</p>

Giant Rat Problem Scientist Using Genetics to Trace Rat Migration By Lee Dye Special to ABCNEWS.com Rodents that began as normal-sized rats like this one, evolved into giant rats after migrating to South America. Now scientists are using genetics to trace their migration. (ArtToday) Oct. 17 -- Rodney Honeycutt set out to solve a scientific mystery, but he soon found himself up to his eyeballs in rats with a very strange story to tell. Honeycutt, a professor of biology at Texas A&M, has been studying the evolution of rodents for the past eight years, and he has been particularly interested ...

The proximate cause of this thread: Here's where I have the trouble. It is metaphysics and philosophy to suggest that such a change could occur. It is science to show the mechanism by which the change occurs. It is metaphysics and philosophy to suggest that enough small changes would take you from a crawling lizard to a flying one. It is science to lay out all the form transitions in the fossil record that show a lizard with four legs, then several intermediate stages where two of the legs turn into wings and two become like bird legs, with the ...