Canadian commander Chris Hadfield has shared with the world his cover version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, which he recorded on the International Space Station.

The full video was posted on YouTube shortly before Hadfield handed over command of the space station to Russia's Pavel Vinogradov.

Hadfield has been on the International Space Station since December 2012 and in command of the vessel since March. He will now return to Earth.
BBC News
Design by: Josh Edson

In a story that sounds like it came straight from the Bible — or Pinocchio — Paul Templer claims he was swallowed by a hippo while leading a kayak tour down the Zambezi River. The hippo attack happened 17 years ago, but this week Templer recounted the horrifying tale to the Guardian.

Templer was a 27-year-old river guide who had led tours down the Zambezi in Zimbabwe many times and had weathered several of what he considered “half-hearted attacks” by a certain territorial male hippo. Those half-hearted attacks gave Templer no clue as to the potential viciousness of the bull, who attacked one day, apparently out of the blue. The vicious assault killed an apprentice guide before turning on Templer who had approached to try and help his co-worker.

“There was no transition at all, no sense of approaching danger. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind and deaf,” Templer recalled in the Guardian. Templer did not immediately understand what happened to him, though. He said:

I was aware that my legs were surrounded by water, but my top half was almost dry. I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs, and a tremendous pressure against my chest. My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around – my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo’s snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.
TIME
Design by: Vaimiti Tragin

Mars One, a Dutch company, has begun its search for volunteers to fly and live on the red planet - but it's a one-way trip.

At a press conference in New York City on Monday, the company's CEO Bas Lansdorp announced an open call for anyone to apply for the flight, knowing that they will never be able to return home. The mission will be one-way only because there currently is no technology that would enable a return trip from Mars to Earth.

"Today, the Mars One foundation starts the search for Mars inhabitants. The search for people from all nations who want to settle on Mars. Mars One is a non profit organisation that is working on landing the first crew on Mars in 2023 and another crew every two years after that," he said.

The plan, Lansdorp explained, is to send four astronauts to Mars with the goal of establishing a permanent human colony.

Takeoff, landing and various parts of the mission will be streamed on the internet, and viewed by 4bn people, according to Lansdorf's estimate. Anyone can apply for the mission, though there is an application fee that will go towards the estimated $6 billion required to fund the mission.

Applicants must be between 18-40 years of age and in good physical condition. Good people and survival skills and reasonable grasp of the English language are also required.

Mars One plans to train the team for seven years before the flight, which will take seven months to reach the red planet.
Aljazeera
Design by: Ohara Hale

Chrissy Amphlett, the raunchy lead singer of the Australian rock band Divinyls whose hit "I Touch Myself" brought her international fame in the early 1990s, died at her home in New York City on Sunday. She was 53 years old.

"Christine Joy Amphlett succumbed to the effects of breast cancer and multiple sclerosis, diseases she vigorously fought with exceptional bravery and dignity," her musician husband Charley Drayton said in a statement.

"Chrissy's light burns so very brightly. Hers was a life of passion and creativity. She always lived it to the fullest. With her force of character and vocal strength, she paved the way for strong, sexy, outspoken women," he said.

Amphlett was an icon of Australian music renowned for her distinctive singing voice as well as edgy stage performances clad in school uniforms and fishnet stockings.

She was born on Oct. 25, 1959, in Geelong city in Victoria state, cousin of 1960s Australian pop star Patricia Amphlett, known as "Little Pattie," who was at her New York bedside on Sunday.
ABC News
Design by: Ken Smith

Two bombs that exploded in the crowded streets near the finish line of the Boston Marathon have killed at least three people, including an eight-year-old boy, and injured at least 176 in a bloody scene of shattered glass and severed limbs that raised alarms that terrorists might have struck again in the US.

The Boston Globe named the boy who died as Martin Richard, from Dorchester in Boston, and reported that his mother and sister had suffered grievous injuries in the attack. A third child was uninjured.

Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis said no suspects were in custody but "we are questioning many people". Investigators were reviewing streams of video gathered from nearby security cameras.

People were told to stay out of the city as it was announced the FBI had taken over the investigation into the blasts. They occurred just before 3pm local time (5am AEST) and went off within 100 metres of each other near Copley Square in what appeared to be a co-ordinated attack.

Eight children are among the injured, including a two-year-old boy in intensive care with head injuries. At least 10 people have had limbs amputated. No one has claimed responsibility for the carnage.

Richard DesLauriers, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office, said the bureau was treating the inquiry as "a criminal investigation that is a potential terrorist investigation".

It has been suggested the bombings may have been timed to cause maximum damage, with both blasts occurring when the largest proportion of runners were due to cross the finish line.

Early reports suggested five unexploded bombs had been found near the finish line but by nightfall, authorities were saying no other explosive devices had been found. As many as seven suspicious packages had been destroyed but they were later found not to be bombs.

The two bombs that went off at the finish line were described by one of the officials as relatively small and possibly containing small ball-bearings or BB gun pellets, designed to serve as shrapnel. It was unclear whether the devices were remotely detonated or included timers, the official said, adding that no conclusions had been drawn on whether a group or lone wolf had been responsible for the attack.

Injuries from the two explosions ranged from cuts and bruises to lost limbs. Many people suffered lower-leg trauma and shrapnel wounds, while some suffered ruptured eardrums.

There were reports that ball-bearings had been pulled from victims' bodies. The Boston Globe reported victims had been brought to hospital with metal debris embedded in their bodies, debris which doctors did not think was shrapnel from the bombs.

"This is the sort of carnage you expect to see in war," said Alasdair Conn, chief of emergency services at Massachusetts General Hospital, where 22 victims were taken, six of them critical, including four with traumatic amputations.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Design by: Jai Mitchell

Margaret Thatcher, the most dominant British prime minister since Winston Churchill in 1940 and a global champion of the late 20th-century free market economic revival, has died.

Her spokesman, Lord Bell, said on Monday: "It is with great sadness that Mark and Carol Thatcher announced that their mother Baroness Thatcher died peacefully following a stroke this morning. A further statement will be made later."

Downing Street announced that she would receive a ceremonial funeral with military honours at St Paul's Cathedral.

David Cameron, who is cutting short his trip to Europe to return to London following the news, said: "It was with great sadness that l learned of Lady Thatcher's death. We've lost a great leader, a great prime minister and a great Briton."

He told the BBC: "As our first woman prime minister, Margaret Thatcher succeeded against all the odds, and the real thing about Margaret Thatcher is that she didn't just lead our country, she saved our country, and I believe she will go down as the greatest British peacetime prime minister."

Cameron later said parliament would be recalled on Wednesday "for a special session in which tributes will be paid" to Lady Thatcher.

In a statement, President Barack Obama said that, "the world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend."
The Guardian
Design by: Timothy Lovett

The Pentagon ordered an advanced missile defence system to the western Pacific on Wednesday, as the US defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, declared that North Korea posed "a real and clear danger" to South Korea, Japan and America itself.

The deployment of the battery to the US territory of Guam is the biggest demonstration yet that Washington regards the confrontation with North Korea as more worrying than similar crises over the past few years. It also suggests the Americans are preparing for a long standoff.

North Korea ramped up its rhetoric on Wednesday, warning that it had authorised plans for nuclear strikes on targets in the US. The North Korean military said that the "moment of explosion is approaching fast" and that war could break out "today or tomorrow".

An unnamed North Korea army spokesman, in a statement carried by the Korean Central News Agency, said its military had been cleared to wage an attack using "smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear" weapons.

Early on Thursday the Yonhap news agency in the South said North Korea had moved what appeared to be a missile that might be capable of reaching Guam to its east coast. The Musudan missile, thought to be untested, had a theoretical range of 1,875 miles (3,000km) which would put all of South Korea and Japan within its reach, said Yonhap, quoting unnamed South Korean and US intelligence sources.

Other reports said the North had given South Korean companies until 10 April to pull out of the Kaesong factory park run, which is operated jointly by the two countries and remained cordoned off by the North on Thursday. South Korea's reunification ministry denied such a deadline had been given.
The Guardian
Design by: Laaja Dixon

KAZIRANGA NATIONAL PARK, India—Sotybon Pegu, a forest guard here, is proud of his role in the deaths of two poachers this month.

Mr. Pegu said his crew came under fire from a group of four men armed with AK-47s hunting vulnerable one-horned rhinos. They shot back, killing two, while the others fled.

"I'm not answerable to anyone to protect the rhinos. I will not let anyone harm them," he said.

Authorities in the northeastern state of Assam, where Kaziranga is located, are taking a more muscular approach to combat poachers who killed 22 rhinos in the park last year, three times the number in 2010. So far this year, they have killed 13 rhinos from a species painstakingly brought back from the brink of extinction over the past century.

The state government is pushing hundreds more guards into Kaziranga, a park that draws more than 100,000 tourists each year to a poor region that has been torn by separatist violence. Assam is arming the guards for the first time with automatic weapons and plans to soon deploy drones to monitor poachers by air. The park guards also are now shielded from prosecution by the extension of state laws that protect them if they kill poachers in the line of duty.
Wall Street Journal
Design by: Maria Radun

Scientists say they have discovered an unexpectedly large and active community of single-cell organisms living on the Pacific sea floor at the deepest site on Earth.

The "surprisingly active" community of microbes exists about 11 kilometres below sea level in the Mariana Trench.

The Mariana Trench is one of the world's most inaccessible places, around 200 kilometres south-west of Guam.

Many scientists had thought that the deeper the floor below sea level, the more deprived it would be of food - which has to float all the way from the oxygen-rich surface to the bottom of the ocean.

But researchers found the trench houses almost 10 times more bacteria than a nearby six-kilometre deep site.

Ronnie Glud, of the University of Southern Denmark, says the bacteria were living on organic waste from dead sea animals, algae and other microbes which settle on the ocean floor.

"It's surprising there was so much bacterial activity," he said.

"Normally life gets scarcer the deeper you go - but when you go very deep, more things start happening again.

"We find a world dominated by microbes that are adapted to function effectively at conditions highly inhospitable to most higher organisms."

For the latest study, an international research team used a specially designed underwater robot with ultrathin sensors to probe the seabed for oxygen consumption.
ABC News
Design by: Bec Kilpatrick

In January, a new group of medical-research chimpanzees began arriving at a retirement home in Louisiana called Chimp Haven. Before their arrival, the chimps had been housed at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s New Iberia Research Center, a primate research facility that had been in trouble for illegal chimp breeding and Animal Welfare Act violations.

After a period of quarantine at Chimp Haven, the chimps are being released into their new habitat, and video footage has captured a few of those moments.
Many chimps stepping onto the grass had never before seen the sky, or walked on natural ground. Now, these retired lab animals will get to just be chimps, grooming one another and learning dominance hierarchies, without bars between them.

“To witness chimps coming out into the natural habitat after seeing what they’ve been exposed to in the past is rewarding beyond anything that I can say,” Chimp Haven’s Kathleen Taylor said in the video.

A total of 110 chimpanzees from New Iberia will be retired to Chimp Haven, the result of an ongoing National Institutes of Health review of chimp research. If the NIH decides to retire all its chimps, another 450 may make their way from laboratory confines to open, grassy sanctuaries where they can live more-natural lives.

For now, though Chimp Haven can only handle about half of the New Iberia chimps. The facility needs to raise money to house the others.

“After all these years of advocating to get these chimps out of laboratories, it was extremely emotional to see them get to look up and look at the sky without bars overhead,” said Kathleen Conlee, vice president of animal research issues at the Humane Society of the United States. “It was very — I knew it would be emotional, but it struck me like a ton of bricks.”
Wired Science
Design by: Alex Naghavi

A man dressed as the caped crusader Batman has handed over a wanted man at a Bradford police station before disappearing into the night.

Police said the costumed crime-fighter marched the 27-year-old man into Trafalgar House Police Station, in the early hours of 25 February.

The man was charged with handling stolen goods and fraud offences.

Police said: "The person who brought the man in was dressed in a full Batman outfit. His identity remains unknown."

Despite speculation on social media the arrested man could know the mysterious crime-fighter, West Yorkshire Police said: "We do not know the identity of the man dressed as Batman and do not know if he is friends with the man who was handed in."
BBC News
Design by: Ready 2 Rumbl

Evidence of a drowned "microcontinent" has been found in sand grains from the beaches of a small Indian Ocean island, scientists say.

A well-known tourist destination, Mauritius (map) is located about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) off the coast of Africa, east of Madagascar. Scientists think the tiny island formed some nine million years ago from cooling lava spewed by undersea volcanoes.

But recently, researchers have found sand grains on Mauritius that contain fragments of the mineral zircon that are far older than the island, between 660 million and about 2 billion years old.

In a new study, detailed in the current issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, scientists concluded that the older minerals once belonged to a now vanished landmass, tiny bits of which were dragged up to the surface during the formation of Mauritius. (Also see "World's Oldest Rocks Suggest Early Earth Was Habitable.")

"When lavas moved through continental material on the way towards the surface, they picked up a few rocks containing zircon," study co-author Bjørn Jamtveit, a geologist at the University of Oslo in Norway, explained in an email.

Most of these rocks probably disintegrated and melted due to the high temperatures of the lavas, but some grains of zircons survived and were frozen into the lavas [during the eruption] and rolled down to form rocks on the Mauritian surface."
National Geographic
Design by: Jennifer Hillhouse

Gym class came to a halt inside the Chelyabinsk Railway Institute, and students gathered around the window, gazing at the fat white contrail that arced its way across the morning sky. A missile? A comet? A few quiet moments passed. And then, with incredible force, the windows blew in.

The scenes from Chelyabinsk, rocked by an intense shock wave when a meteor hit the Earth’s atmosphere Friday morning, offer a glimpse of an apocalyptic scenario that many have walked through mentally, and Hollywood has popularized, but scientists say has never before injured so many people.

Students at the institute crammed through a staircase thickly blanketed with glass out to the street, where hundreds stood in awe, looking at the sky. The flash came in blinding white, so bright that the vivid shadows of buildings slid swiftly and sickeningly across the ground. It burst yellow, then orange. And then there was the sound of frightened, confused people.
New York Times
Design by: Brock Kenzler

KISS fans are lapping up the relaunch of an 1980s ice block, raiding stores and auctioning off merchandise on eBay before the product has even hit the shelves.

Peters Ice Cream has re-issued the 1980 KISS “Thunderbolt” ice block, named after 1976 hit God of Thunder, to coincide with the KISS Monster Tour later this month.
KISS's $15000 Australian tour packages sell out

Paul Stanley said the original "popsicle", launched to coincide with Unmasked tour (See video below), was an indication of how big they were at the time.

"When we first came to Australia we knew we were big," Stanley tells fans on YouTube. "Kissteria had gripped the nation and we heard about how massive we were and we had this huge following and we were a phenomenon, this was the sign of a real phenomenon, that we also had popsicles named after us."
News.com.au
Design by: Justin Overell

The French National Assembly has approved the most important article of a bill to legalise same-sex marriage.

Deputies voted 249-97 in favour of redefining marriage as being an agreement between two people - not just between a man and a woman.

President Francois Hollande's Socialists and their left-wing supporters backed it, opposed by many opposition UMP and centrist MPs.

The proposals have generated protests and counter-protests for months.

Opinion polls suggest that around 55-60% of French people support gay marriage, though only about 50% approve of gay adoption.

Correspondents say the ease with which the article passed suggests the bill as a whole will pass.

Debates are expected to go on for more than a week, as MPs discuss hundreds of amendments, most of them filed by the centre-right opposition.

On the way they are expected to approve the other key measure in the bill, which would allow gay couples to adopt children.
BBC News
Design by: Sophie Blackhall-Cain

The stifling pollution currently plaguing much of northeastern China has reached levels so high it is beyond the measurements used in the U.S. to chart air quality.

“What Beijing is experiencing–and even worse in the provinces–is off the charts from anything we experience in the United States, and likely more than anything we’ve experienced in our country’s history,” said John Walke, the director of the Climate & Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental group.

The U.S. measures air quality using a six-color scale indexed from 0-500. The higher the number, the greater and more dangerous the pollution. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 50 would represent good–or "code green"–air quality, while anything over 300 represents hazardous–or "code maroon"–air quality.
VOA
Design by: Ash Thompson

Barack Obama has told the American people to "seize the moment", in a speech in Washington DC inaugurating his second term as US president.

He issued a plea for political unity while embracing liberal causes such as immigration reform, gay rights and the fight against climate change.

Mr Obama, 51, who is the 44th US president, was sworn in for his second term by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Hundreds of thousands of people crammed the ceremony on the National Mall.

Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, along with dozens of senators, congressional leaders and other dignitaries, attended the event at the US Capitol.
BBC News
Design by: Joseph Alessio

US President Barack Obama has unveiled the most sweeping gun control proposals in two decades, setting up a showdown with firearms rights advocates.

He called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and wider background checks on gun buyers.

The Democratic president also signed 23 executive actions, which do not require congressional approval.

A month after the school massacre in Connecticut, he said gun-control reforms could wait no longer.

Mr Obama unveiled the proposals at the White House on Wednesday, flanked by children who wrote him letters after December's Newtown shooting, which left 20 children and six teachers dead.
BBC News
Design by: Nick Misani

Scientists have captured footage of an elusive giant squid, estimated to have grown as large as eight metres long, that roams the depths of the Pacific Ocean.

Japan's National Science Museum succeeded in filming the deep-sea creature in its natural habitat for the first time, working with Japanese public broadcaster NHK and America's Discovery Channel.

The massive invertebrate is the stuff of legend, with sightings of a huge ocean-dwelling beast reported by sailors for centuries.

The creature is thought to be the genesis of the Nordic legend of Kraken, a sea monster believed to have attacked ships in waters off Scandinavia over the past millennium.

Modern-day scientists on their own Moby Dick-style search used a submersible to get them into the dark and cold depths of the northern Pacific Ocean, where at around 630 metres they managed to film a three-metre specimen.

After around 100 missions, during which they spent 400 hours in the cramped submarine, the three-man crew tracked the creature from a spot around 15 kilometres east of Chichi Island.
ABC News
Design by: Bea Fiteni

Two Australian sky surveys named Wallaby and Dingo are expected to discover 700,000 galaxies over the course of the new year.

A huge new radio telescope facility in Western Australia will scour vast regions of space to provide clues about galaxy evolution.

The £65m Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (Askap) is located in a remote desert region of Western Australia, 196 miles from the port of Geraldton. It consists of 36 dishes, each 12 metres (39ft) wide, which work together as a single antenna.

Askap will also help astronomers investigate one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: dark energy. This is the force which appears to be causing galaxies to fly apart at an accelerating rate. Although no one is sure what dark energy is, it is believed to account for 73% of the universe.

Scientists were able to predict Askap's capabilities by combining its specifications with computer simulations. Dr Alan Duffy, a member of the Askap team from the University of Western Australia, said: "Askap is a highly capable telescope. Its surveys will find more galaxies, further away, and will be able to study them in more detail than any other radio telescope in the world.

"We predict that Wallaby will find an amazing 600,000 new galaxies and Dingo 100,000, spread over trillions of cubic light years of space."

The telescope will examine galactic hydrogen gas – the fuel that forms stars – to see how galaxies have changed in the past 4bn years.
Guardian
Design by: Daniel Hennessy