Using a robotic telescope at the ESO La Silla Observatory, astronomers have for the first time measured the velocity of the explosions known as gamma-ray bursts. The material is travelling at the extraordinary speed of more than 99.999% of the velocity of light, the maximum speed limit in the Universe.

"With the development of fast-slewing ground-based telescopes such as the 0.6-m REM telescope at ESO La Silla, we can now study in great detail the very first moments following these cosmic catastrophes," says Emilio Molinari, leader of the team that made the discovery.

Quantum entanglement is one of the many non-intuitive features of quantum mechanics. If two photons of light are allowed to properly interact with one another, they can become entangled. One can even directly create pairs of entangled photons using a non-linear process called SPDC (Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion).

Those two entangled photons can then be separated but as soon as one of them interacts with a third particle, the other photon of the pair will change its quantum state instantaneously.

Some call it the eighth wonder of world. Others say it's the next Great Wall of China.

Upon completion in 2009, the Three Gorges Dam along China’s Yangtze River will be the world's largest hydroelectric power generator and one of the few man-made structures so enormous that it's actually visible to the naked eye from space.

The "snows" of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro inspired the title of an iconic American short story, but now its dwindling icecap is being cited as proof for human-induced global warming.

However, two researchers writing in the July-August edition of American Scientist magazine say global warming has nothing to do with the decline of Kilimanjaro's ice, and using the mountain in northern Tanzania as a "poster child" for climate change is simply inaccurate.

A remarkable new long-necked, gliding reptile discovered in 220 million-year old sediments of eastern north America has been discovered, scientists report. Mecistotrachelos apeoros (meaning "soaring, long-necked") is based on two fossils excavated at the Solite Quarry that straddles the Virginia-North Carolina state line.

Primates with severe Parkinson’s disease were able to walk, move, and eat better, and had diminished tremors after being injected with human neural stem cells, a research team from Yale, Harvard, the University of Colorado, and the Burnham Institute report today.

These results are promising, but it will be years before it is known whether a similar procedure would have therapeutic value for humans, said the lead author, D. Eugene Redmond Jr., professor of psychiatry and neurosurgery at Yale.