Britain’s first ever dung-fired power station started operating on Thursday, taking the excrement of nearly 5,000 cows and lighting up homes around the north coast of Devon.
There was no fanfare, nor any celebrity opening for the Holsworthy Biogas plant, which will take dung from 28 local dairy farms, using it to generate electricity and [...]

An Iranian man, convicted for raping and killing his 16-year-old nephew, will be executed by being thrown off a cliff in a sack, a newspaper reported on Thursday.
If the unnamed man survives the fall down a rocky precipice, he will be hanged, legal experts said. He has 20 days to appeal the court sentence. [...]

Lasers can open a temporary doorway into cells so that DNA can get inside, researchers in Germany report. This technique might hasten gene therapy by making it easier to get new genes into living cells without harming them.
It could also be useful for DNA vaccination. This new method for fighting viral, bacterial and parasitic infection [...]

Type in DrinkCoke.org into your Internet browser and you won’t see the famous loopy logo or any reference to the caffeinated brown fizz. What you will see are plenty of photographs of dismembered, bloody fetuses.
The venerable soft-drink maker, along with dozens of other businesses, news media organizations, school districts and celebrities, has been targeted [...]

Since 1986, Patent No. 4,698,672 has done little more than languish in the archives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Government examiners first issued the patent, which covers a “coding system for reducing redundancy” to a San Jose, California, company called Compression Labs. The approval came more than a decade before the digital imaging [...]

Just over 2,000 adults in Britain were interviewed for the report by Which? Online.
The study found almost 19 million people in the UK – four in 10 adults – were now online, with men making up just over half of all users.
But despite this, the number of people venturing into cyberspace has slowed down. [...]

A visual aid for sign language interpreters is now being marketed to computer addicts.
The so-called “Ultraview Mirror” is usually used by those giving sign language translations to audience. The two-mirror setup allows for a rearward view without reversing the image.
The Baltimore, Maryland-based company that makes the device says its been seeing requests for computer users [...]

Indian scientists say cow urine is a “bio-enhancer” that can dramatically reduce dosages and side effects for patients taking antibiotics and cancer drugs, a specialist journal, Chemistry and Industry, reports in its July issue.
The scientists have received an American patent, 6 410 059, for the discovery that a “distillate of cows’ urine” greatly boosts the [...]

Cloned pigs have been born for the first time in South Korea, with scientists using somatic cells, a researcher said Wednesday.
Gyeongsang National University Professor Kim Jin-Hee said three female piglets were born Sunday night as part of a cloning project by researchers at his university.

Crimped by a shoestring budget, a costly war and an economic crisis, Israel’s small but spunky space program is about to take a giant leap forward by sending its first astronaut aloft.
The Israel Space Agency (ISA) will be in the limelight when Colonel Ilan Ramon takes off with the next NASA shuttle mission, probably in [...]