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Using clues from star and sun positions mentioned by the ancient Greek poet Homer, scholars think they have determined the date when King Odysseus returned from the Trojan War and slaughtered a group of suitors who had been pressing his wife to marry one of them.
It was on April 16, 1178 B.C. that the great warrior struck with arrows, swords and spears, killing those who sought to replace him, a pair of researchers say in Monday's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

There is water ice on Mars within reach of the Mars Phoenix Lander, NASA scientists announced Thursday.

Photographic evidence settles the debate over the nature of the white material seen in photographs sent back by the craft. As seen in lower left of this image, chunks of the ice sublimed (changed directly from solid to gas) over the course of four days, after the lander's digging exposed them.

For more than 400 years, astronomers have studied the sun from afar. Now NASA has decided to go there.
"We are going to visit a living, breathing star for the first time," says program scientist Lika Guhathakurta of NASA Headquarters. "This is an unexplored region of the solar system and the possibilities for discovery are off the charts."

Norwegian-born philanthropist Fred Kavli awarded seven scientists his first batch of $1 million prizes for astrophysics, neuroscience and nanotechnology on Wednesday.
Kavli, a physicist who left Norway in 1955 with $300 and turned it into a $340 million fortune in California, set up the prize for advances in research ranging from deep space to how the brain works and the use of molecule-sized devices.

A Japanese centre which says it has trained a dog to sniff out human cancer cells is cloning the animal in South Korea, a Seoul bio-technology company and the dog's owner said on Wednesday.

Cloned foetuses from the black labrador retriever named Marine were in April implanted into a surrogate mother dog, said Ra Jeong-Chan, president of RNL Bio.

"We are going to see the clones around the end of May," Ra said.

Marine, who is six and half years old, lost her ability to reproduce when she had her womb removed because of disease.