
International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations has declared its disagreement with Prof. Robert Edwards being awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work in developing in vitro fertilization. The problems of infertility, the group said in an official statement, must be solved within an ethical framework which respects the dignity of the embryo as a human being.

The fossil of a giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago has been discovered in Peru. Scientists say the find shows that key features of the plumage were present quite early on in penguin evolution.

United States astronomers have found a new, potentially habitable Earth-sized planet. It is one of two new planets discovered around the star Gliese 581, some 20 light years away, report the Carnegie Institution and the Santa Cruz, University of California.

While rescuers have insisted that the 33 Chilean trapped miners at San Jose mine will be evacuated in early November, the government has suggested that the rescue will most likely be as early as mid-October.

Last September 17 and for two days the ozone layer hole recorded a minor event over the city of Punta Arenas in the extreme south of Chile, although not sufficiently weak as to have recorded an increase in potentially dangerous ultraviolet radiation.

Sunflowers are likely to have sprung up about 50 million years ago in Argentine Patagonia, suggests a fossil report according to an article in the current edition of Science magazine.

Cattle infected with mad cow disease give off a tell-tale glow in their eyes, according to new research published in the journal Analytical Chemistry. In future, the discovery could lead to a long-sought test to detect infection with the agent that causes mad cow disease, preventing it from spreading throughout the food supply for humans.

Former Argentine President Nestor Kirchner is back in the Los Arcos hospital with heart trouble. There were no immediate announcements from the government, but according to the local Noticias Argentinas news agency, the husband of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner Fernandez underwent an angioplasty after he was rushed to a clinic in the capital late Saturday night with numbness in his legs.

A killer shrimp has been found for the first time in the UK at an Anglian Water reservoir in Cambridgeshire, England. Two anglers spotted the shrimp, which can be as small as three mm, at Grafham Water near St Neots on Friday September 3 and sent samples to the Environment Agency for identification.

The University of Cambridge has knocked Harvard University off the top of the QS World University Ratings, as the U.K. establishment’s number of academic citations rose.