Gregory Mone

Scientists in Spain and Croatia have found that certain spider species that feed, breed and travel upside-down are more energy efficient because of it. For the spiders, it turns out, walking is more of a swing—they use gravity to their advantage. They effectively act as a pendulum, and require less muscle mass in the legs to move themselves forward.

News of another extrasolar planet hardly grabs headlines anymore, now that scientists have pushed the count far above 200. But yesterday a group of astrophysicists says it may have uncovered evidence of a foreign planet being born.

Japan's space agency gave it the OK. A famous astronaut says he'd get involved. They even tested a prototype in a wind tunnel. Still, it does sound nearly too off-the-wall to be true: Japanese scientists have teamed up with origami experts to design a paper airplane that could withstand re-entry and make its way from space back to Earth.

Brigham Young University bear biologist Thomas Smith says that guns aren't necessarily your best option when facing down one of the beasts.

Smith and his team analyzed 20 years worth of incidents in Alaska, and found that the wilderness equivalent of pepper spray effectively deterred bears 92 percent of the time, whereas guns only did the trick one-third less often. (He studied polar bears, too, hence the picture, at left, of an unconscious mother and her cubs. And yes, he did get away before everyone woke up.)

It would have been pretty heartbreaking for space fans if Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Martian rovers, had survived on the Red Planet all these years, only to be shut down and lost for good due to budget cuts.

Apparently NASA sent a letter last week to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the lab that runs the rovers' program, specifying a $4 million cut. Scientists said this move would have forced them to put one rover into hibernation mode, and limit the duties of the other.

Behave yourself in Miami, because the eyes-in-the-sky may soon be watching. We're still not sure about all those rumors concerning insect-sized flying vehicles keeping watch over cities, but larger versions certainly seem to be on the way.

The Cassini probe has found evidence that there may be an underground ocean on Saturn's moon Titan. The moon is already an area of tremendous interest to planetary scientists, given its dunes, lakes and mountains. It also has one of the most Earth-like surfaces in the solar system. Now, by using radar measurements to detect changes in the moon's rotation, scientists have gotten more insight into what's below the surface.

Google says the US government is ignoring a precious natural resource. And no, the search giant obviously isn't talking about oil. Google, along with other big companies, wants the US government to open up unused air waves. The company says this could lead to people across the country surfing the Web on handheld devices at gigabits-per-second speeds.

Six weeks ago, the Monterey Bay Aquarium released a young white shark into the ocean, and the swimmer has already cruised down the coast to the waters off Mexico.

The shark, which spent 162 days at the aquarium after it was accidentally caught by a local fisherman, is the first to carry two different tracking tags.

An 81-year-old man constructed a machine that allowed him to remotely fire a .22 semi-automatic pistol, then set it up in his driveway and killed himself. Reportedly, the man's relatives had been encouraging him to move out of his home and into a care facility.

Instead, he did some research on the Internet and built what was only described as a complex machine—the local paper that broke the story is keeping wraps on how it actually worked.

In a new review article in Nature Geoscience, two scientists say that black carbon, the stuff that gets kicked up into the air from biomass burning and diesel engines, among other things, could account for as much as 60 percent of the warming effect of carbon dioxide. That's three to four times greater than most estimates, and more than that of any greenhouse gas save CO2.

Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays carry more energy than any known particles in the universe, so we should probably all take it as good news that scientists have confirmed that they don't originate in our cosmic neighborhood. In fact, the majority of these rays—which are mostly hydrogen and helium—lose most of their juice on their way towards Earth because they interact with the cosmic microwave background radiation, the energetic leftover of the Big Bang.

Let's get to the limitations right away: Mac and even Firefox users will have to sit this one out, since it only runs on a PC, in Internet Explorer. And XP is probably your best bet, too, since Vista users have apparently reported some glitches when using the beta version of this very cool new interactive tool.

All that aside, though, the Visible Body, a new, and free, interactive experience from Argosy Publishing, is pretty mind-blowing. It's Gray's Anatomy in 3-D. (The book, people, not the show.)

A new low-cost, nanotech-based approach to power generation developed by researchers at Boston College and MIT could lead to cleaner-running semiconductors, air conditioners, car exhausts and more. The technique, published online yesterday in Science, uses the nanostructures to dramatically increase thermal efficiency.

Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Florida International University have developed a technique that enables them to identify the weak spots in a structure from afar.

The program they developed, Scan and Solve, uses 3D data of an object to predict where it is most likely to fracture, and how its faulty spots will be affected by outside forces such as gravity or other forms of strain.