GEE, sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
Check out this story on some female sharks that are, well, apparently capable of virgin births:
A team of American and Irish researchers have discovered that some female sharks can reproduce without having sex, the first time scientists have found the unusual capacity in such an ancient vertebrate species.
FIVE Filipino students recently bagged major prizes in the recently held Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.
The first winner was Hester Mana Docasao Umayam, a 15-year-old student from Philippine Science High School-Cagayan Valley Campus, who was one of the seven fourth place winners in the individual Behavioral and Social Sciences category.
Umayam’s winning project is entitled “Ethnomathematics in the Geometric Patterns in Woven Fabrics of the Indigenous Kalingas in the Philippines.” As described in the title, Umayam used mathematical techniques, particularly the relatively new ethno-mathematics, in analyzing the cultural significance of patterns used in fabrics created by the people of Kalinga.
SCIENTISTS are testing a robot in one of the world’s deepest sinkholes, which happens to be located in El Zacaton, Mexico.
Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times story:
EL ZACATON, MEXICO–NASA is testing a robot in one of Earth’s deepest sinkholes in a first step toward searching for life on Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa.
El Zacaton, near the Gulf Coast of northeastern Mexico, is about 328 feet wide and 1,000 feet deep. Over the next two weeks, scientists plan to map and take samples in the dark, water-filled fissure with the 1.5-ton DEPTHX robot. It’s a prelude to the proposed navigation of Europa’s ice-capped oceans in about 20 years.
THINK they’ll induct Voltes V, Mazinger Z and Daimos? Or how about the Transformers, heh 
Check out this excerpt from a CNET News.com story:
Aside from its Robot Hall of Fame, CMU has unique outreach projects to engage mainstream America with robots. It has hosted RoboCup, a global soccer tournament played by robots, and most recently released DIY robot recipes that allow anyone to make robots from off-the-shelf parts through its Terk program. The people behind CMU’s unique Robotics Institute have also become a hot topic for analysis since the release of a nonfiction book about them by Lee Gutkind.
On Tuesday, Matt Mason, the director of the Robotics Institute at CMU announced the 2007 inductees into the Robot Hall of Fame. The honor, which is judged by a jury of both leading science and science fiction experts, was created in April 2003 to call attention to the contributions robots and their creators make to society.
DOES dark matter really exist? Scientists have found more proof that it does.
Here’s an excerpt from the Agence France-Presse story:
Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a ring of dark matter in a galaxy cluster some five billion light-years away from Earth, which measured some 2.6 million light-years across.
